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Dell SC Series vs Dell Unity XT comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell SC Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Frame-Based Disk Arrays (2nd)
Dell Unity XT
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
196
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 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 SC Series is 0.8%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 7.0%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Steven McClendon - PeerSpot reviewer
Superior platform with excellent snapshots and cost-saving auto-tiering
I'm a big fan of the SC Series platform. Its feature set is superior to some of the other platforms. The snapshots on SC are excellent, allowing for multiple snapshot schedules for any one system. The auto-tiering functionality intelligently moves new data to the highest performance tier and then progresses it down to less expensive tiers over time, providing cost savings for customers.
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient data replication and fast IOPS have improved operational performance
Dell and a partner jointly implemented this solution in Auvink. We installed the Flash, which makes our IO operations fast and efficient. Replication is available, allowing us to replicate data simultaneously from one site to another. All-flash technology and vTXT enhance speed, and the IOPS are faster. The cache's IOPS are much better. Snapshots provide a unique feature for testing and make management more comfortable and easy. The platform is multi-supported and certification is more convenient and easy to manage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The latency is good."
"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits my customers. It's highly advantageous due to its affordability. The operational aspect is also noteworthy. Additionally, its availability and performance are commendable. The speaker are also equally powerful."
"Its feature set is superior to some of the other platforms."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"We replicate between SAN to SAN for a lot of features and supportability. It also helps us when we want to upgrade to a newer SC Series or move the data from one data center to another."
"The solution is stable; we've had no problems at all."
"The solution has a wide variety of valuable features. The data progression works well. We use the snapshot functionality quite a bit and really like it."
"I think that Dell EMC is one of the best technical support services in Ukraine."
"A valuable feature is the performance of the auto-tiering. It will move hot data up to your fastest Tier 1 or move your slow data down. Data progression is what it's called. With the auto-tiering you can have multiple tiers, you can have your Tier 1 be either spinning or flash, all the way down to 7.2K. It will change the RAID on the fly so your writes come in at RAID 10. After they sit for a while, they get converted to RAID 5, then they'll cool off and move down the tiers. Your performance is kept going, while the cold data is moved to your slow, non-performance tiers."
"It has helped us be able to use less administrators per device or system. Therefore,we are more streamlined."
"I like the easy management with the new Unisphere management and the HTML5 interface."
"Replication of the communication object (COB) scenarios"
"We use replication for disaster recovery (DR), making our DR process much easier."
"There are also DR and data protection functions that we found in the new Unity, now that we are stepping up from VNX and other storage appliances, that we've started implementing."
"The most valuable features include snapshots, Thin Clones, and deduplication and compression."
"Dell EMC Unity XT has good integration with VMware."
"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."
 

Cons

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."
"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."
"The connection should be better integrated with the network to offer a better view of the system."
"We can definitely see a need for it being a multi-controller system for customers who want to scale beyond the current capability. That's always a downside. A lot of the new systems are scaling vertically, they scale out, and the Compellent, of course, is controllers with shelves under it, so you don't scale out with it, unless you add another one. But if you do, they don't talk to each other, like some of the other solutions that we sell."
"It's not very efficient anymore. There are better products out there."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"We have seen some degraded throughput with mixed workloads. We have been working with Dell EMC to correct some of these latency issues."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."
"If Dell SC Series could have supported the protocol NVMe over TCP, that would have been great. It does not."
"We have had some downtime. Nothing is perfect. Unity’s have had some code-release problems, versions that, from a compatibility perspective, had some glitches which caused an outage. But, given the amount of Unity’s we run, that has been fairly minor and it hasn't happened at scale or across all of our Unity’s."
"​Improve the interface and provide more management capability."
"Licensing costs could be reduced."
"Our customers are mostly happy with Unity except for the price. We primarily sell to enterprise companies because small companies cannot afford it."
"I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage."
"Recently, they released products, sometimes without proper testing, it seems."
"Firmware Upgrades in EMC Unity require you to manually download OS and Drive firmware, this should be integrated (Nimble does this). When you order an EMC Unity, you have to specify the block size. This is weird for me and even weirder that you cannot change this afterwards, you should be able to specify per LUN/datastore (Nimble does this as well)."
"I miss storage groups. Now, if I have to add a LUN to a cluster, multiple host, I have to know which host is in that cluster. I have to write it down and that makes it hard. In VNX and earlier, I could simply put a LUN on a storage group and every host in the group had the LUN. This lack bothers me a lot because it takes a lot of time and mistakes are made. Sometimes, a Hyper-V host gets a VMware LUN and vice-versa. Not good."
 

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."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"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."
"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."
"We have found the solution to be affordable."
"The SC Series was priced fairly. I wouldn't call it either expensive or cheap because we had a very tight budget, so if they were able to fit in that type of budget, they met our expectations."
"It's a very affordable solution."
"The pricing of Dell EMC Compellent is competitive."
"We were able to afford two tiers of flash storage at a price where the competition was giving us one tier or just a handful of discs."
"This product is too expensive compared to others, and I don't see any value in using it."
"The maintenance is usually pretty good. It's not like some of the others where they increase it in the fourth, fifth, or sixth years."
"Compared to other solutions out there, it's affordable."
"While it has a good price to start, they could always make it cheaper."
"Its biggest valuable feature is its price point for the amount of storage and performance you get. It's a sweet spot. It's cheaper than the other SANs out there, but performs well enough. It fits that nice, middle-ground portfolio."
"Obtaining a warranty is easy."
"The price of Dell EMC Unity XT is not reasonable. They should lower it because the trend is to move to the cloud. They have to protect their market by giving commercial or financial incentives."
"The solution’s pricing is competitive."
"As far as licensing goes, I love how VMware works with Dell EMC Unity. It's great. They work hand in hand. They have made it so simple."
"There is an annual charge for the license of this product. It has better pricing than its competitor: Pure Storage."
"From an ROI perspective, I'll put it this way: When we've tried to buy other SANs, the Unity ROI makes it impossible to buy them. So usually, the only time we buy another SAN is when the ROI isn't a factor, because Unity can't do the job. From an ROI perspective, it's great because it beats everything else out. We've tried to look at other options but, at the end of the day, when you price it out, the Unity wins."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
55%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Government
3%
 

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.
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 ...
What do you like most about Dell SC Series?
I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell SC Series?
Cost considerations are crucial when choosing between solutions like Dell and NetApp. Sometimes Dell offers better pe...
What needs improvement with Dell SC Series?
In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage. If I want...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
I saw that you have doubts about what you chose. I have a lot of experience with the constructor, honestly I can reco...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
They’re both great solutions and I’ve used both. EMC is being VERY aggressive on pricing which may be the undoing of...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
First of all the decision should be taken looking at similar products in terms of capacity and performance. I will sh...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
SC Series Storage, Compellent
EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric
Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell SC Series vs. Dell Unity XT and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.