Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Dell ECS vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) comparison

Sponsored
 

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 reduces costs, enhances efficiency and reliability, improves performance, and offers competitive pricing and support benefits.
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
8.1
Nutanix Unified Storage receives high praise for responsive, efficient support, with knowledgeable staff and effective escalation, enhancing satisfaction.
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 praised for its scalability, flexibility, and seamless growth, making it ideal for expanding businesses.
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 praised for 99.9% reliability, stability, robust features, and quick issue resolution with excellent support.
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 users seek improved interface, protocol support, pricing, vendor integration, security, support, scalability, and management features.
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.
The main concern is pricing, which could deter some customers; addressing this would enhance its appeal.
The system should move towards AI-driven optimization and enhance S3 object storage capabilities.
Nutanix could improve the ability to track user actions, such as identifying who deleted a folder.
 

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 is feature-rich and cost-effective for enterprises, with flexible pricing despite initial high expenses.
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 excels in integration, performance, flexibility, security, and efficiency, offering cost savings and simplified management.
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.
The cybersecurity features of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) when dealing with unstructured data, such as ransomware threats, provide the ability to detect and back up block-based storage, allowing me to restore repositories or sets of block storage with one button click, which is automatic.
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.
 

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
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (6th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), Public Cloud Storage Services (5th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 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 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is 3.1%, up from 2.1% 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.…
Vishnu Mohan - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized management and high resiliency streamline data storage with immediate benefits and scalability
The most effective features of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for us are about making multiple copies of our data across hardware nodes, ensuring that if there is a hardware failure, we still don't lose our data, which I think is the most important. Also, they have a file solution that is good for file shares, and that is of value to us. The switch from solutions such as IBM to Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) was driven by the need for different skill sets for a separate storage team and separate compute team. Maintaining these old devices was getting prohibitively high, so consolidating everything onto Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) made sense and allowed one set of Nutanix engineers to manage the entire estate.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File and Object Storage solutions are best for your needs.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
32%
Educational Organization
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Unified Storage?
Nutanix solutions are often perceived as premium-priced, but they deliver substantial ROI in terms of performance, re...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?
Nutanix Unified Storage is already a robust and forward-thinking platform. That said, one area for potential improvem...
 

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: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.