Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe comparison

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20,066 views|11,707 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
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1,952 views|1,181 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and Pure FlashArray X NVMe based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Dell Unity XT vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe Report (Updated: March 2024).
772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It is a workhorse and will run even demanding workloads.""Key features are ease of use, ease of management, ease of deployment, and the GUI is very user-friendly.""The flash aspects of the Unity make it incredibly fast. The fact that you get that much storage directly on what is basically a 3U box to us, that density has been really useful.""I don't think I've ever seen latencies above 10 milliseconds unless it was something that wasn't the array that was messing up. The thing is rock-solid.""The compression and deduplication that will be coming in version 4.3. With just those features, you're reducing the amount of data and the footprint on the hardware.""The All-Flash models are pretty fast for the vast majority of our remote workloads.""Via a click, we can deploy a data store or LUN to the ESX host. We can also deploy VVOLs to the ESX server.""The most valuable features of Dell Unity XT are the data compression for all of our VMs up to four times and the performance is good."

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"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users.""The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature.""The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes.""The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use.""FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle.""What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate.""The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly.""The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."

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Cons
"I would like to see better compression, better dedupe. It's not nearly as good as what is built into the XtremIO. I understand why that is the case, but if they can take some of that technology and leverage that a little bit better in the Unity array, that would be great.""Dell Unity XT could add a unit-to-unit replication. We haven't seen that because we don't have an additional one to test. However, it is not an improvement, but something that we would like to have visibility on how it's done or how it works.""Because we can do synchronous replication between the two sites, this made the setup challenging for this piece. They did not know how to set this up initially. We ended up having to do bidirectional synchronous replication.""The Host LUN ID is sequential by access in the hosts. When one LUN needs access by many hosts (for cluster purposes), in some cases the Host LUN ID remains different on each host.""We need to improve the controller to work as active-active. We also need to improve the snapshot on the Unity site.""This solution would be improved with the addition of flexible raid volumes.""I rate the scalability of Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.""I would like to see more compression and deduplication added to the solution. Today, our compression is about 2:1 and other solutions give us about 4:1 or 5:1."

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"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems.""I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware.""The UI for this solution needs to be improved.""It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking.""There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product.""Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution.""We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency.""We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The price is good for commercial grade storage arrays."
  • "This unit is one of the cheapest storage all-flash arrays in the market and it does well for what it is intended. It can be combined for both file and block storage."
  • "Licensing is easy since all the software is included."
  • "This product is cheaper than the EMC VNX solution. It is good for small businesses."
  • "It is shipped with all licensed, included for this product range, no need to buy additional licenses"
  • "The only improvement would be a lower cost per unit/disks, however on the whole we are very pleased with this product."
  • "For costing, you have to have a budget in mind because SANs can be fairly expensive and EMC offers a wide range of products."
  • "The pricing was quite okay compared to others. We probably got it cheaper because we were the first ones out of the gate, but I would say that it's good value for the money."
  • More Dell Unity XT Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."
  • "We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
  • "With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
  • "Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
  • "As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
  • "They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."
  • "Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
  • "The licensing is on a yearly basis."
  • More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I saw that you have doubts about what you chose. I have a lot of experience with the constructor, honestly I can recommend Dell EMC Unity XT All-flash which can guarantee you a ratio of 3:1 signed by… more »
    Top Answer:They’re both great solutions and I’ve used both EMC is being VERY aggressive on pricing which may be the undoing of NetApp. Differences are in the user interface mostly, they both do what they are… more »
    Top Answer:First of all the decision should be taken looking at similar products in terms of capacity and performance I will show a few aspects helping the decision, comparing Unity Xt480f and AFF220 (both… more »
    Top Answer:Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.
    Top Answer:The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it.
    Top Answer:The tool's pricing is higher than competitors.
    Ranking
    4th
    out of 48 in All-Flash Storage
    Views
    20,066
    Comparisons
    11,707
    Reviews
    21
    Average Words per Review
    395
    Rating
    8.1
    15th
    out of 48 in All-Flash Storage
    Views
    1,952
    Comparisons
    1,181
    Reviews
    9
    Average Words per Review
    400
    Rating
    8.8
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity
    Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
    Learn More
    Overview

    Dell EMC Unity XT is one of the best all-flash storage arrays on the market today. Dell EMC Unity XT arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built for a multi-cloud world. In addition, they support digital transformation, enabling businesses to reach the full potential of their data capital quickly and easily. Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms provide the performance, efficiency, enterprise-class software, and virtualization integrations required for running a wide range of virtualized applications.

    Dell EMC Unity XT Features

    Dell EMC Unity XT has many valuable key features, including:

    • Unified storage flexibility: With Dell EMC Unity XT you can consolidate separate storage platforms into a single Unity XT unified storage system via a simple and intuitive (HTML5) management GUI that also connects you to CloudIQ.

    • All-inclusive data protection: Dell EMC Unity XT offers a reliable way to protect application data with all-inclusive data protection services, including snapshots, data-at-rest drive encryption, replication, thin clones, and dynamic pools.

    • Software-defined solutions: Dell EMC Unity XT provides software-defined storage and HA for on-prem and in the cloud solutions.

    • Multi-cloud alignment: With Dell EMC Unity XT you have the ability to build and manage an effective data-first multi-cloud strategy. It allows you to consolidate public and private cloud resources that align with your business goals.

    • Metro node: This feature enables automated business continuity with zero RPO and RTO. It also provides greater flexibility through multi-platform support and replication to any array and has zero performance impact on the storage array.

    • Scalable file system: Dell EMC Unity XT is built with a robust 256TBu file system. The UFS64 file system includes up to 256 independent VMDK clones, 16 thin clones, space efficient snapshots with a simple space reclaim and low IO impact, file system shrink that can reclaim free blocks, simplified Quotas for User, and much more.

    • DevOps integrations: Dell EMC Unity XT supports the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin to run Kubernetes workloads.

    Dell EMC Unity XT Benefits

    Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC Unity XT include:

    • High-speed data access
    • Low latency
    • Dual-active controller architecture
    • Multi-cloud
    • Intuitive user interface
    • Cost efficient
    • Solid performance

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC Unity XT users.

    A Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company says, "It is definitely one of the most robust, solid, well-performing products that I have dealt with. It is set it and forget it, which is pretty amazing." He also mentions, “We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device.”

    Peter S., Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company, states, “The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs. This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.”

    PeerSpot user Melvin T., Senior Systems Engineer at Prosperity Bank, explains that the solution is “easy to use and we can add LUNs or space without interruption to end-users. We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity."

    Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

    Sample Customers
    Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre
    Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Healthcare Company13%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization66%
    Computer Software Company6%
    Manufacturing Company4%
    Government3%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company23%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Comms Service Provider14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise46%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise70%
    Large Enterprise20%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise60%
    Buyer's Guide
    Dell Unity XT vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Unity XT vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 190 reviews while Pure FlashArray X NVMe is ranked 15th in All-Flash Storage with 28 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while Pure FlashArray X NVMe is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure FlashArray X NVMe writes "Reasonably priced, scales well, and offers good stability". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem, whereas Pure FlashArray X NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Nimble Storage, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, Pure Storage FlashArray and Pure Storage FlashBlade. See our Dell Unity XT vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe report.

    See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.

    We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.