Dell XtremIO vs HPE Nimble Storage comparison

Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #23 with an average rating of 7.8, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.4. Dell Technologies holds a 0.8% mindshare in AFS, compared to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 99% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell XtremIO and HPE Nimble Storage compete in the robust storage solutions category. HPE Nimble Storage seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features and higher user satisfaction.

Features: Dell XtremIO users highlight its seamless scalability, consistent performance, and effective inline deduplication and compression. HPE Nimble Storage users value its reliability, predictive analytics, and unified flash fabric.

Room for Improvement: Dell XtremIO feedback indicates a need for better integration with existing environments, improved reporting features, and data migration tools. HPE Nimble Storage users suggest enhancements in data migration tools, lower latency, and better integration with third-party tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell XtremIO users find its deployment straightforward but report mixed experiences with customer service. HPE Nimble Storage deployment is smooth, with users praising its comprehensive support and faster setup times.

Pricing and ROI: Dell XtremIO is perceived as expensive, with users feeling the high cost is justified by its performance. HPE Nimble Storage offers competitive pricing and is seen as delivering better ROI due to its overall reliability and efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell XtremIO vs. HPE Nimble Storage Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO vs. HPE Nimble Storage

September 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 November 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell XtremIO is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Nimble Storage is 2.3%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
HPE Nimble Storage	2.3%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe	1.1%
Dell XtremIO	0.8%
Other	95.8%

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh

Chief Technology Officer at Lambda256

Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.

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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.

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Ajit Pratap Kundan

PreSales Lead- Government & Defense at Accops Systems Pvt Ltd

A tool that offers protection against ransomware and other enterprise-level attacks

HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high, making it one of its downsides. HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high compared with any HCI solutions, like HPE's SimpliVity, Nutanix, VMware, or Dell VxRail. A person requires a special skill set to operate HPE Nimble Storage because there are hardly any solutions similar to Nimble Storage in the market. The product's support can be made faster and more responsive if HPE trains its partners in such a way that they acquire more expertise on Nimble Storage through the training sessions. HPE Nimble Storage is dependent on only VMware vSphere Hypervisor. In the future, HPE has to make Nimble Storage feasible with other hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix Acropolis, and RHEV, meaning it should be hypervisor agnostic.

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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

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

"I appreciate the performance."

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."

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

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"We are satisfied with the performance as it is significantly faster compared to traditional storage options."

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

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"XtremIO is very stable."

"Performance and deduplication. This is a very robust block storage option that offers both performance and data optimization."

"The program is very stable."

"The solution's most valuable feature is its high performance."

"We've seen great enhancements from the performance point of view. There's good availability, stability, and continuity, but the performance actually has increased by 60 or 70%."

"It is great for applications like Microsoft Exchange, ERP, SQL and VDI; basically saved the VDI buy-in from users, as now performance was seamless in comparison to a physical PC."

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

"A valuable feature of XtremIO is that, in terms of administration, it's simple and manageable."

More Dell XtremIO pros

"The stability is awesome. The product has always been reliable. It has been 100 percent up. We have never had any downtime with it. Even if a controller fails due to our firmware or whatever, it rolls over to the second one and keeps us running."

"The quality of the service and management tools let us make contractual guarantees for storage performance for customers. That's something we couldn't do before."

"Their tech support is very professional, know their products, know what they do, and they are very informative in terms of keeping the customer updated."

"The interaction with VMware is most valuable."

"HPE Nimble Storage uses the InfoSight platform and it is useful because we can identify the faults and can analyze the performance. It has many other features. This feature is the best that I have observed from HPE Nimble Storage."

"We use InfoSight predictive analytics. It helps us from a performance perspective by identifying potential bottlenecks."

"Its speed, ease of use, and it has been completely reliable."

"The management software that runs in the cloud is called InfoSight and it is very good. It is similar to machine learning software that monitors your hardware."

More HPE Nimble Storage pros

Cons

"It is on the expensive side."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."

"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Dell's technical support could be better."

"The product could be improved by reducing the pricing and having better organization in their technical support team."

"The management should be improved and the GUI interface could be better and easier."

"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."

"This solution is geared toward enterprise-level companies. Small and medium-sized businesses would find it extremely expensive."

"I believe having more replication options comparatively to VMAX (other than RecoverPoint) would be great."

"It can be more cost-efficient."

"The solution's stability has certain shortcomings where improvements are needed."

More Dell XtremIO cons

"I would like deduplication by default on all the volumes. I still don't understand (or know why) dedupe isn't enabled for the templates out-of-the-box. We have to go in and manually enable it each and every time."

"I want it to be an active-active array. Nimble would be great as an active-active array because then everything checks out. It would give a feeling of comfort."

"There is no active-active controller, which means that we can only have one controller online at a time."

"An area that needs improvement is extending the life of the device after five years."

"The solution could reduce its price."

"The stability can be improved."

"I would like to have integration into cloud providers, apart from HPE."

"The solution needs to be an active-active controller."

More HPE Nimble Storage cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"This is the best flash array on the market for high-end workloads, so expect to pay for that. But the support subscription cost is fixed for seven years, which made it easier for us to plan on the maintenance costs."

"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."

"You can get a two-year or three-year license for the tool. You can also opt for a perpetual-based licensing model, which can be renewed on a yearly or two-year basis."

"This solution is a little bit pricey."

"It is expensive if you need to increase scalability."

"The license for XtremIO is in the box, so you don't have to buy anything."

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

"With some workloads that benefit from compression and deduplication, costs are actually better than some tier 2 subsystems (while latency remains <1ms)."

More Dell XtremIO pricing and cost advice

"The price of HPE Nimble Storage is good."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing ten out of ten."

"I think HPE Nimble Storage is less expensive than Primera and is the best solution for Venezuela."

"It is more expensive than one of its competitors."

"If you don't go cheap, it is eventually worth it. However, the initial investment is high."

"The solution is a little pricey compared to others on the market."

"The pricing is expensive, although we do not pay anything in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"My company has opted for HPE GreenLake payment model, meaning the billing is done on a quarterly basis."

More HPE Nimble Storage pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user182013

Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at Rubrik

May 1, 2015

Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR

Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	29

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	42
Large Enterprise	40

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?

The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...

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...

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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

How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...

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Which would you choose - HPE Nimble Storage or HPE Primera?

HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. Th...

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What do you like most about HPE Nimble Storage?

The solution's predictive analytics is good. It helps to save costs.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 22% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 16% of the time

Dell PowerMax vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 13% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

TrueNAS X-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 4% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 26% of the time

Dell PowerMax vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 18% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 13% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 10% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 10% of the time

More Dell XtremIO Competitors

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 12% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 12% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Primera vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 10% of the time

NetApp AFF vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 8% of the time

More HPE Nimble Storage Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

October 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO

November 2025

Download Dell XtremIO product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Nimble Storage

October 2025

Download HPE Nimble Storage product report

Also Known As

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

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

Nimble Storage

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

HPE Nimble Storage is a highly effective All-Flash Storage Array solution that aims to enable organizations to reliably store and access their data. Organizations across a wide variety of industries trust Nimble Storage to assist them with all of their data storage-based needs. It both tracks all of the IT architecture that an organization uses and protects that architecture from a variety of digital threats.

HPE Nimble Storage Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy HPE Nimble Storage include:

Increased security. Nimble Storage provides organizations with powerful layers of protection. It leverages predictive analytics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to keep businesses from suffering harm related to emerging threats. The AI and ML software identifies threats before they can threaten a user’s data.

Reduced costs and increase profits. Businesses that deploy Nimble Storage find that their overhead costs end up being significantly reduced by up to 49%. One of the reasons for this is that Nimble Storage uses a “pay as you go” subscription model which means that users never pay for more storage than they actually need.

Ease of use. Nimble Storage is simple for administrators to utilize. They can install it without any kind of outside assistance. It is also simple for the average administrator to manage without specialized training.

HPE Nimble Storage Features

Artificial intelligence. The backbone of Nimble Storage’s IT infrastructure is its AI software. The HPE InfoSight feature makes it so that administrators don’t need to make guesses when managing their data storage. It offers users suggestions as to what they can do to improve their storage performance.

Scaling. Nimble Storage gives users the ability to scale their data storage so that it appropriately meets their needs. They can both “scale up” or increase the sheer amount of data that they can store at a given time and “scale out” or increase their ability to perform effectively.

Hybrid storage. Nimble Storage has the ability to store data both on the cloud and on-premises so as to meet an organization’s storage requirements. Its multi-cloud feature enables users to seamlessly manage all of their data storage and utilization operations with ease.

Reviews from Real Users

HPE Nimble Storage is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its ease of use and its powerful InfoSight analytics feature.

Andrew B., Head Of Information Technology at Zambia National Building Society, writes, “It's a very easy solution. Whenever I have a question, I find they have already provided a solution for it.”

Prataparao D., Technical Solution's Consultant for HPE Storage Devices at Karvy Innotech, says, “HPE Nimble Storage uses the InfoSight platform and it is useful because we can identify the faults and can analyze the performance. It has many other features. This feature is the best that I have observed from HPE Nimble Storage.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Raiffeisen Bank Bulgaria, Wentworth-Douglas Hospital

Ace Relocation, Atkins Nutritionals, Berkeley Research Group, Canadian International School, City of Hot Springs, Clackamas County, Corona-Norco Unified School District, Ideal Integrations, Linear Technology, P&O Maritime, Retail Apparel Group (RAG), Virtual Radiologic

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO vs. HPE Nimble Storage

September 2025

Free Report: Dell XtremIO vs. HPE Nimble Storage

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