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Dell ECS vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
8.4
Pure Storage FlashBlade delivers cost savings, efficiency gains, and increased VM density, with returns seen within four years.
Sentiment score
8.7
Dell ECS delivers cost-saving benefits and quick ROI, with users valuing its stability and reliability over financial gains.
Sentiment score
7.6
Nutanix Unified Storage enhances productivity, reduces costs, and boosts performance, offering quick scalability and over 50% ROI.
For me, the biggest return on investment when using this solution is that we do not have to have much support staff to run it.
The scalability challenge with previous systems is lessened with Nutanix since we can expand by adding new hardware without needing migrations.
We are saving approximately 20% to 25% compared with the competition.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.2
Pure Storage FlashBlade's customer service is praised for expertise but sometimes experiences slower responses due to growth challenges.
Sentiment score
7.6
Dell ECS customer service is efficient and highly rated despite some challenges, especially for premium service customers.
Sentiment score
8.0
Nutanix Unified Storage is highly praised for responsive, expert support, though complex issues sometimes face delays or time zone challenges.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
There is a lack of SUSE Linux experts which affects the level of support.
The response time and quality of the technical support are satisfactory.
Customer support is generally good but sometimes struggles with complex issues.
They come on the call, start troubleshooting immediately, and resolve issues effectively.
They are very knowledgeable, and if they can't solve the problem, they find the answer within a day or so.
I would give the customer service and technical support a ten out of ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.9
Pure Storage FlashBlade is praised for its scalability and ease of expansion, satisfying various industries like banking and media.
Sentiment score
8.4
Dell ECS is highly rated for its scalability, ease of expansion, and adaptability across various business sizes and environments.
Sentiment score
8.1
Nutanix Unified Storage is favored for its flexible, scalable system, although improper initial sizing can complicate scaling.
Through the fabrics, it provides the clustering, allowing us to add nodes easily.
It allows scale-out processes by adding extra nodes, providing flexibility for customers to increase capacity on demand.
I would rate scalability between eight or nine, as it provides a good ability to scale and expand storage.
This means you don't have to buy everything upfront; you can buy what you need and add more as you grow, which is advantageous.
I can rack mount the server or node and add it to the cluster anytime with just one click.
Scalability is fine with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS); it allows compatibility and building on top of existing infrastructure.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.8
Pure Storage FlashBlade is highly rated for stability, reliability, and performance, with minimal downtime and swift recovery.
Sentiment score
8.2
Dell ECS is highly stable and reliable, maintaining performance even with heavy data, earning ratings around nine out of ten.
Sentiment score
8.5
Nutanix Unified Storage is highly stable and reliable, with minimal downtime and effective support, favored by government and banking sectors.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
We have not experienced any outages in the last four years.
I'd rate stability maybe 9.5 out of ten.
Dell ECS provides high stability compared to other object solutions.
We have not experienced these issues with Nutanix, which I attribute to the all-flash technology, the quality of their platform, and the responsiveness of the hyper-converged infrastructure.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is very stable.
It automatically triggers tasks, causing performance issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Users want better cloud integration, support, pricing, efficiency, and improvements in analytics, configuration, and backup for FlashBlade.
Dell ECS requires improved scalability, performance, cost-effectiveness, support, security, and integration, alongside a user-friendly interface and enhanced documentation.
Nutanix Unified Storage needs improved interface, integration, security, support, expanded features, flexible pricing, and AI integration.
Its configuration should be easier.
Live logs should be viewable through the GUI like with Logstash or Elasticsearch.
The deployment is not easy, and some expertise is required to configure the virtual data center and replication groups.
Incorporating extra integrations beyond S3, like Hadoop file systems, and being well aligned with trends like AI solutions would be beneficial.
Nutanix could improve the ability to track user actions, such as identifying who deleted a folder.
Including a more granular snapshot restoration process would greatly improve usability, allowing us to restore deleted files rather than the entire share.
A migration tool to transition to better syncing for DR would be valuable, as otherwise, we lose 30 days because of the storage requirement.
 

Setup Cost

Pure Storage FlashBlade is costlier but valued for performance, ease, and reliability, justifying its comprehensive licensing with included software.
Dell ECS pricing is seen as mixed, with some valuing its cost-effectiveness, while others desire more flexible pricing options.
Nutanix Unified Storage offers strong ROI with flexible pricing, advanced features, and competitive costs, especially for existing users.
It relies on nearline SAS drives, which are cheaper than flash or SSDs.
The pricing model is on the higher side compared to other vendors.
The price is reasonable given the abundance of features, including managing, control, host resources, dockers, and containers.
Compared to buying three or four vendor solutions, it is much cheaper.
The cost has doubled for the same amount of data, which was a challenge when presenting use case justifications for the increased cost.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has definitely helped reduce our total cost of ownership.
 

Valuable Features

Pure Storage FlashBlade offers high performance, scalability, and ease of use with excellent data protection and seamless integration for large storage needs.
Dell ECS excels in integration, scalability, performance, and reliability, offering competitive pricing and robust features for unstructured data storage.
Nutanix Unified Storage offers user-friendly, efficient, scalable storage with strong data protection, ease of integration, and streamlined management features.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The stability of this solution is a major advantage, as we've not experienced any outages in the last four years.
If we encounter any issues or need to upgrade anything, we can simply open a ticket, and the EMC team is there to assist us.
Dell ECS is very easy to handle, primarily because the web UI dashboard and everything is very easy to manage for every customer.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is appreciated for its fault tolerance and redundancy at the cluster level, which ensures reliable storage of files, folders, and other information accessible on the client side.
My experience with using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for data-intensive workloads is that we have many SQL Servers and they perform much better than they did when we used hybrid converged previously.
The migration from VMware to Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is less complex and less troublesome, and the replication and clustering are very good.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade
Sponsored
Ranking in File and Object Storage
6th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (16th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (7th)
Dell ECS
Ranking in File and Object Storage
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)
Ranking in File and Object Storage
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (6th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), Public Cloud Storage Services (6th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the File and Object Storage category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 5.8%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell ECS is 7.8%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is 3.1%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File and Object Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eric Black - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us
The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.
SamuelThomas - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing efficiently with user-friendly interfaces for monitoring and managing resources
We normally recommend Dell ECS to enterprise customers and government customers Dell ECS is very easy to handle, primarily because the web UI dashboard and everything is very easy to manage for every customer. They can monitor the DPS, access failures, bandwidth, failed requests, and latency.…
Juan-Contreras - PeerSpot reviewer
Ensures streamlined management, simplified infrastructure, and efficient data handling
It has effectively managed our unstructured data, including audio and video files. We've experienced smooth operations without any complaints regarding uploading or downloading videos. While video usage isn't as frequent, we primarily utilize it for downloading videos related to specific incidents for administrators or our police department. We've encountered no issues uploading files of any kind. Transitioning from VMware to Nutanix has highlighted the overall flexibility of Nutanix's platform. Unlike VMware's three-tier system, Nutanix simplifies the learning curve by streamlining operations. The update process, in particular, has been favorable, with no critical issues encountered. The resiliency of Nutanix hasn't been thoroughly tested in our environment so far. However, I routinely check fault tolerance settings to ensure they meet our requirements. During the update process, I've observed critical errors occur as hosts restart, but Nutanix's self-healing mechanism handles these issues seamlessly. The benefit of using Nutanix is evident in several ways. Firstly, we've effectively compressed our storage while significantly expanding our overall storage pool. Previously, our service had a capacity of twenty-five terabytes, but with Nutanix, we've scaled up to a hundred and twenty terabytes physically and approximately fifty terabytes logically. This expansion has been accompanied by noticeable improvements in performance, particularly with reduced latency and IOPS well within the boundaries of our equipment. All our resources are centralized in a single location for managing and running storage: our data center. We operate three Nutanix nodes within this center, effectively managing everything from one central location. We don't have any other locations outside of our data center running a Nutanix cluster. Nutanix's capability to eliminate silos within our organization's storage infrastructure was discussed during our recent call with the engineer. Although we haven't explored this feature extensively yet, there's a forthcoming project where we anticipate leveraging it.One thing I'd appreciate is having a desktop application similar to what VMware offered. With VMware, I could download a separate client program onto my computer, allowing me to log in directly rather than accessing the host through a browser.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
32%
Educational Organization
19%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?
Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC ECS?
The pricing is moderate and at par with the market. As a service provider, we receive good margins, indicating a favo...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC ECS?
Dell ECS is not fully compatible with S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ), as it supports around ninety percent of S3 ...
What do you like most about Nutanix Unified Storage?
Nutanix has excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language.
 

Also Known As

No data available
EMC ECS, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, EMC Elastic Cloud Storage
Nutanix Files Storage, Nutanix Volumes Block Storage, Nutanix Objects Storage
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
Atos
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell ECS vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.