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Dell Unity XT vs HPE Nimble Storage 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 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
HPE Nimble Storage
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
10th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.3
Number of Reviews
121
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 Unity XT is 7.0%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Nimble Storage is 2.4%, down from 5.8% 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.
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.
Ajit Pratap Kundan - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is scalable."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"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."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"We just recently started using the Dynamic Pools, so while it's scalable, we actually find it valuable that we can just pop in one or two drives when we need to, instead of having to add a whole RAID set. That has actually been very handy for us."
"We were able to integrate it very quickly with other solutions."
"It has good performance."
"The most valuable aspects of this solution are its stability, performance, and ease of updating."
"The initial setup is very easy. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy."
"The multiprotocol support. It's supporting NFS, fiber channel, CIFS, and these kinds of things. The multiprotocol is very attractive."
"It does great deduplication. From a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk"
"It is very stable."
"The interaction with VMware is most valuable."
"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."
"It's easy to use, it's just like 3PAR. I made clusters of 32 hosts with 50 volumes and that took barely an hour. I scripted a lot of it, filled in the names of volumes, the names of servers."
"They do a good job of helping people do storage in a very simple way."
"The deduplication and compression capabilities are powerful."
"This solution has given us reliability that is evident by the fact that it has been running for five years with virtually no hiccups."
"I have found the convergence rate and deduplication the most valuable features."
"Definitely ease-of-use. I've experienced many different arrays out there and Nimble is definitely there."
 

Cons

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"The reporting should be better. In other systems, you can create many different kinds of reports but this is not the case with Dell."
"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."
"We would like an AI feature that would protect the backup and minimize the consumed space so we can maintain the quality of the backup. This would help us minimize our IT cost in terms of the backup procedures."
"The initial installation is straightforward and took approximately one hour. However, the full process was not as simple as IBM."
"The pricing is a bit high. We'd like it to come down."
"Dell Unity XT could improve the compatibility of some of the features. Some of my customers had some problems. Additionally, it would be beneficial for the solution to have advanced AI and ML features."
"One of the issues we've had is that controllers have crashed several times... We've had a lot of problems with the storage processor, SPBs. We've actually had them crash."
"My only complaint would be some of the CLI Help files could be a little more detailed, but that's very minor complaint. We were trying to run some commands just to see how the storage snaps were interacting with the storage array, and it was a little difficult to look up exactly what commands should be run. The Help files detailing what exactly the commands did wasn't as detailed as we would have wanted them to be."
"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."
"The amount of firmware updates released seem excessive."
"The way the market is going, supporting NVMe storage would be useful as a step up."
"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 would like to see native network attached storage (NAS) functionality. Our customers are looking for NAS, and Nimble can't give it to them."
"I would like to see greater integration with Microsoft's Hyper-V platform."
"I would like to have more administrative rights, for example, root-level administrative rights to the underlying OS of the storage array. We want more access to the kind of underlying infrastructure of the storage array rather than relying on support. However, most companies are looking to have more managed solutions which is the opposite direction of what I want."
"I would like to have integration into cloud providers, apart from HPE."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"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."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"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."
"We purchased a five-year warranty."
"We bought extended warranties out of the box because our customer has a bad habit of managing warranties."
"This unit is one of the cheapest storage all-flash arrays in the market and it does well for what it is intended. It can be combined for both file and block storage."
"This solution offers great pricing."
"We have to apply for a license for each system."
"With the large Unity that we bought, it has saved us about one and a half rack space. That's our return on investment on our flash array. We also need less Fibre Channel connectivity."
"When you look at what Dell EMC is compared to, like NetApp, they're all priced pretty similarly. I think the pricing of the hybrid model is good."
"Our costs are roughly $200,000 a year."
"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."
"Performance per dollar, when we looked at it, was the highest that we could get for what we needed."
"Nimble Storage is too expensive for our enterprise customers."
"The pricing for this product is somewhat high."
"It is cost-effective, which is important for a service provider, because you're competing with hyper-scale providers who do things at extremely large scale, who tend to kill you on price if you're not careful."
"The price has room for improvement."
"I rate HPE Nimble Storage's pricing an eight out of ten. It can be expensive, especially when considering console ports and renewals."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
44%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
4%
Educational Organization
49%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
4%
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 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 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...
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...
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...
What do you like most about HPE Nimble Storage?
The solution's predictive analytics is good. It helps to save costs.
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity
Nimble Storage
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Nimble Storage and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.