Dell XtremIO vs NetApp AFF comparison

Dell Technologies and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #22 with an average rating of 8.0, while NetApp is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.1. Dell Technologies holds a 0.8% mindshare in AFS, compared to NetApp’s 9.4% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

NetApp AFF and Dell XtremIO are high-performance storage solutions catering to enterprise needs. Users express greater satisfaction with the features and reliability of NetApp AFF compared to Dell XtremIO.

Features: NetApp AFF users highlight its unified storage, high performance, and seamless integration with various applications. Dell XtremIO users value its scalability, deduplication, and consistently high performance under heavy workloads.

Room for Improvement: NetApp AFF users cite the need for a more intuitive setup process and better support for hybrid cloud deployments. Dell XtremIO users seek improved documentation and enhanced compatibility with third-party applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetApp AFF receives praise for its relatively straightforward deployment and robust customer service, though some users find initial setup cumbersome. Dell XtremIO is commended for its efficient deployment process, but users indicate a need for better initial guidance and support.

Pricing and ROI: NetApp AFF users report better ROI due to lower setup costs and optimal long-term performance. Dell XtremIO, while having higher setup costs, provides significant ROI through its performance and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell XtremIO vs. NetApp AFF Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO vs. NetApp AFF

June 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell XtremIO is 0.8%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.4%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Stanislaw Jagielski

Trainer, Storage Consultant at Oxon

Efficient and straightforward setup boosts data management capabilities

Scalability is a significant feature of Dell XtremIO, as it is easy to expand and manage. It provides a lot of features suited for complex systems, such as scalability and the ability to define multi-domain systems, which are beneficial for data management and storage separation. It is efficient from the customer's point of view, offering deduplication at both the volume and file levels. The configuration and setup are straightforward, provided one has knowledge in setting up network infrastructure like VLANs. It is easy to install, use, and configure, making it a reliable product.

Read full review

Ian Rousom

Owner at RTX

Flexible with great support and high-speed multi-protocol storage

Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident. We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability. It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time. We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."

"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."

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."

"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"We mostly use it for backup, because we cannot measure anything, and we are afraid to use it for surveillance systems. We were planning to use it for mostly for surveillance systems."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"I like the deduplication and auto-tiering features."

"The most valuable feature of Dell EMC XtremIO is the data protection (DP) group, it is one of the most advanced features in these types of arrays. The dedupe and compression that this array provides both do a superb job."

"Initially, we faced numerous issues with our analytical systems. However, we saw performance improvement after the implementation of the solution."

"XtremIO’s capability to run any workload without much in the way of design considerations makes this very easy to use and size."

"The feature I like most about Dell Xtremio is its hardware quality compared to other vendors. It's clear they're continuously improving their research and development."

"Scalability is a significant feature of Dell XtremIO, as it is easy to expand and manage."

More Dell XtremIO pros

"The usability of actually being able to scale it out has been great."

"Before we implemented AFF, Oracle was running on a traditional storage spindle and at a very low speed with high latency, and the database was not running very well. After we converted from the spinning disk to the all-flash array, it was at least four times faster to access the volume than before."

"I'm from Germany, so we have lots of metro clusters. The ability to have two sides that are redundant across hundreds or thousands of kilometers is critical for our customers. We have several hundred customers with metro cluster systems, so that is one of the best features."

"Tech support has been absolutely amazing. I think on the technical aspects as well, my staff is able to get great support from the NetApp technical support resources that we have. What I love about NetApp is they have a health care division. At times, it's such an amazing thing because if we have a healthcare-related issue, there's no one better than having prior CIOs from health care organizations that NetApp has hired, and that are part of the health care team, to help out with any of those initiatives and support problems. Support has been absolutely phenomenal."

"We have a unified storage to access the file and NAS. We can do all the things in the same solution. We do not need any other product or storage mix."

"This solution makes everything a lot faster. The time to move data around, boot and migrate VMs is much faster."

"It also helps to accelerate databases in our environment. First of all, there is the reliability of things staying online and the small response time as well, from the MetroCluster, for all of the data that we're serving; and the applications are talking to the MetroCluster. It provides a very fast response time."

"The most important features are the IOPS and the ease of the ONTAP manageability."

More NetApp AFF pros

Cons

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."

"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

"We need better data deduplication."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"XtremIO is coming to its end of life."

"I would like to see more scalability."

"In the next release, the solution could have better integration and if we can host assets on the cloud, such as NetApp has the NetApp volumes, which we can host on the cloud directly called NetApp CVO (cloud volume ONTAP). Dell EMC should come up with something purely on the cloud rather than manage services."

"Management: At the time, there was no snapshot scheduler, so I had to write XSnapCourier to address it. The sad thing is that even after the newest release, which includes a native scheduler, most customers using XSnapCourier chose to stick with it due to a more feature-rich experience."

"Right now, external appliances are needed to replicate XtremIO to XtremIO, or to another EMC system."

"The interface could be simplified for beginners to ease the configuration of special objects in the system."

"Scalability could be better."

"The product is highly expensive."

More Dell XtremIO cons

"It would be much better if you had it more like the way they do Metro Clusters, where they have a switch, and the storage is all attached to a switch."

"The response to basic problems could be faster. They usually respond fast when there are critical issues, but you always want it right now."

"The scaling needs improvement. NetApp is limited for scaling options."

"We had a lot of issues with two-factor authentication using, for example, Okta."

"In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense."

"We installed NetSender to test it. I think it could be a good solution. It is very small now, but will probably become bigger in the next few months to years."

"NetApp AFF is a highly expensive solution, and its pricing should be reduced."

"We should be able to manage NetApp AFF as per the desired usage and needs."

More NetApp AFF cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"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 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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution should be reduced. The price matches the price of a VMAX service but it does not have the capability of a VMAX service. However, the prices of Dell EMC XtremIO can be reduceable."

"The licensing cost is on a yearly subscription basis, which can be expensive but is necessary for ongoing support and services. The pricing could be improved to make it more accessible."

"There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"It is great when a product can deliver high-end performance capabilities while offering a very competitive price point."

"Too high priced for the Brazil market."

"XtremIO is pretty straightforward about pricing. However, you need to look at your data so you can estimate, with the advice of DEL EMC, what data reduction ratio you will reach. In our case, a 3:1 reduction ration gave us a positive case compared to other storage arrays."

"Dell XtremIO's price is affordable and I would rate it a five out of ten."

"It is costly but worth it."

More Dell XtremIO pricing and cost advice

"The licensing and pricing are fine. As a reseller for the product, we need to make the differentiation in the minds of the customer. They are not just buying some tool that does only one thing, e.g., showing a LAN for a customer. The pricing is fair for what it is."

"I understand the cost is less than many other storages of same/similar performance benchmark."

"Always consider whether you can afford the solution."

"Once we did get into the NetApp ecosystem, we realized that the cost effectiveness was greater than we originally thought."

"We have been able to utilize and leverage equipment which was purchased a decade ago up until this past year. So, we were running disk shells for 13 years and all we were doing was upgrading the filings and controllers, and using the same disk shells. Therefore, we were able to do something where we didn't have to invest that much. Recently, we had to upgrade all our disk shells, but it was a lot less because the technology had changed a lot since those times. It is faster now, and we have SSDs. We have larger drives that are 4TBs and 6TBs. Everything can condense so we are saving disk shell space and rack space. We are paying less now than we did at that time"

"It's expensive but we think over time all the prices are going to go down."

"NetApp AFF is an expensive solution."

"Obviously depending on the price point, NetApp is obviously a little more expensive than your generic Dell SAN solution or whatever."

More NetApp AFF pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user186357

Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees

Jan 28, 2015

NetApp vs. XtremIO

Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS? I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

33%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC XtremIO?

The feature I like most about Dell Xtremio is its hardware quality compared to other vendors. It's clear they're cont...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell XtremIO?

Pricing is hard to determine as it depends on the given configuration. XtremIO offers features that justify a potenti...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell XtremIO?

The interface could be simplified for beginners to ease the configuration of special objects in the system. While the...

See all answers

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in t...

See all answers

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended c...

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What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matt...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 29% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 25% of the time

Dell PowerMax vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 16% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 11% of the time

VAST Data vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 8% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 7% of the time

More Dell XtremIO Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF

Compared 16% of the time

NetApp ASA vs NetApp AFF

Compared 9% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series vs NetApp AFF

Compared 8% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp AFF

Compared 8% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs NetApp AFF

Compared 7% of the time

More NetApp AFF Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

June 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF

June 2025

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Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Dell EMC XtremIO Flash, Dell EMC XtremIO X2, XtremIO, XtremIO X2

NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS

Overview

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.

Pure Storage

Bring all-flash, scale-out storage to your enterprise applications with EMC XtremIO. Purpose-built for flash, XtremIO storage arrays are amazingly fast. Delivering high IOPS at less than 1 millisecond latency is just the start. EMC XtremIO helps you harness the power of flash storage by building in innovations like content-based data placement and dual-stage metadata.

Dell Technologies

The NetApp A-Series and C-Series are AFF storage arrays that deliver high performance, scalability, and simplified data management for a wide range of workloads. They are designed for organizations that need to improve the performance and agility of their applications, while also reducing costs and complexity.

NetApp A-Series and C-Series feature a scale-out architecture that can be scaled to meet the needs of your growing business. They also support a wide range of built-in data protection and data security features, including snapshots, replication, disaster recovery, and autonomous ransomware protection.

AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity.

AFF C-Series systems are suited for large-capacity deployment as an affordable way to modernize your data center to all flash and also connect to the cloud.

NetApp AFF Benefits

Speed up your critical applications with lightning-fast end-to-end NVMe enterprise all-flash arrays.
Increase Performance: AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance proven by SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks, making them ideal for demanding, highly transactional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB databases, VDI, and server virtualization.
Save up to 95% of rack space and up to 85% of power and cooling cost over hybrid flash storage.
Reduce cost with guaranteed storage efficiency.
Realize even greater savings by tiering cold data to the cloud easily.
Simplify Operations on premises or in the cloud: Eliminate fragmented and redundant toolsets and combine visibility and manageability of storage instances with data services in a unified control plane across the hybrid cloud.

NetApp AFF Features

Expand capacity with nondisruptive scaling in a cluster without silos or data migration.
Manage data with the ultimate flexibility of unified support across different storage media and protocols, on premises or in the cloud.
Scale performance with technology innovations of NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP connectivity.
Safeguard your data with best-in-class data security, ransomware protection, multifactor admin access, secure multitenant shared storage, and in-flight and at-rest encryption.
Simplify backup and recovery with built-in application-consistent data protection.
Achieve business continuity and fast disaster recovery with zero data loss and zero downtime.
Scale out to 24 nodes, 367PB of effective capacity, and 4 million IOPS non-disruptively.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp AFF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its high performance and simplicity. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

PeerSpot user and Storage Administrator, Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson, comments “AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.

Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high-performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.”

Additionally, Mohan Reddy, Sr. Technology Architect at a Pharma/Biotech company comments on how “NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.”

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Raiffeisen Bank Bulgaria, Wentworth-Douglas Hospital

DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO vs. NetApp AFF

June 2025

Free Report: Dell XtremIO vs. NetApp AFF

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell XtremIO vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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