Dell Unity XT vs HPE StoreVirtual comparison

The compared Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise solutions aren't in the same category. Dell Technologies is ranked #6 in AFS , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 6.7% mindshare in the category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #21 in SDS , and holds a 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and HPE StoreVirtual based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in All-Flash Storage.

To learn more, read our detailed All-Flash Storage Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

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

All-Flash Storage

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

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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Syed Habib

Head of Infrastructure Security (S.A.V.P) at EXIM Bank Ltd

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.

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Vebjorn Nergaard

Senior IT Engineer at Guard Automation AS

Reliable with helpful support and good replication

The setup is okay, however, it comes with a moderate amount of difficulty. If you are new to the product, it is difficult. You do get used to the process over time and it gets easier. A company just needs one person to maintain the solution as it just runs. You don't need any support staff. It's very, very hands-off except when you do updates. The product is living its own life.

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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 solution is very straightforward to set up."

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"I appreciate the performance."

"The solution is scalable."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The setup and installation procedures are easy."

"It has made deployment, configuration, and maintenance a lot simpler."

"It is easy to manage overall. It is all web-based. It has a an easy, nice dashboard. I receive emails if there are issues. When there are any updates, I receive emails. I can either do them on my own, but normally I schedule them with Dell EMC and they remote in, then it's done."

"The Dell EMC unity interface is simple to manage. We manage it by ourselves. We create logs to store data."

"It's an all-flash Unity, With that compression feature, it's comparable to a hybrid. That is one thing that we definitely like."

"Dell Unity XT offers data integration features."

"We run about 100 virtual servers on it. We have about 100 users accessing the file shares from there, and I've seen no problem with that. We have about a 10GB backbone. Whatever we throw at it, it hasn't shown any sign of weakness or anything. It's been really good."

"VMware integration: Grants both the Storage and Virtual Administrator the ability to create and mount datastores, or even to check how much space each VM is consuming."

More Dell Unity XT pros

"Data is stored in two different places, leveraging more security and availability. Therefore, network problems are having less affect on iSCSI."

"The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is hardware independent."

"The seamlessness behind the scenes of block management."

"The network RAID feature gives us maximum availability, since we cannot afford any downtime, even for a second."

"It's very stable and it's easy to use."

"It appears to be very stable and very robust."

"I guess on the top of the list is certainly ease of use."

"HPE StoreVirtual is very easy to use from the management console."

More HPE StoreVirtual pros

Cons

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

"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."

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

"It is on the expensive side."

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

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Problems with I/O modules, with bugs that came out that really should have been caught before the product was released."

"Maybe deduplication would be something that would be better to have. Also, it's a fairly new management interface, so work is still being done on that. But compared to other vendors and previous EMC storage, the Unity is really good."

"We need to improve the controller to work as active-active. We also need to improve the snapshot on the Unity site."

"Perhaps if they added more 10GB ports to the back of the system, so you have more IOPS out of the box itself to the network, that would help."

"The pricing is a bit higher than expected."

"It's very frustrating that it's not backward-compatible with the previous platforms, so it's a struggle for a lot of our customers."

"We integrated it with vSphere but that integration was "iffy". It was okay but we had a few challenges with it."

"The biggest one for us, and the reason we don't use it more, is that we can't throttle the replication speed. If it's on, it's on. So we have to be a little more WAN-sensitive, in some applications, which means we can't put it everywhere. That's the biggest issue for us, by far."

More Dell Unity XT cons

"it would nice to have deduplication or compression, things that you have in some of the higher end products."

"The management aspect of the solution needs to be improved in order to make the product stronger."

"The product is coming to end-of-life in the next three years."

"The solution needs to ensure it is on par with the industry in terms of availability of features and various other options."

"The GUI is a bit old-fashioned. It should be updated."

"Configuration of application integrated snapshots for VMware is convoluted and it did not work immediately."

"User interface could be improved."

"The initial setup could be simplified to make it easier for new users."

More HPE StoreVirtual 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."

"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."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

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

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

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"It scales, but then you have to buy additional stuff."

"This solution offers great pricing."

"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."

"The ROI is right where we need it to be. It's a reasonably priced array."

"The license is not required, but we must renew the support every year, every two years."

"All the licenses are included from day one of your purchase of the product, so you don't have to buy licenses separately. There are no additional costs to be paid for the maintenance of the solution."

"Go with the virtual appliance versus the hardware."

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

"One of the key features about it is that when you buy either a VSA license or a StoreVirtual appliance, all your software's included."

"It costs less than $10,000 for one machine. If it costs more than 15% higher than this, then the customer may change to another solution."

"The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil."

"Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen."

"If you buy a five-year license, not only does the technical support expire after five years, but you also lose the ability to change and expand the VSA, and the systems won't go down."

"For our organization, I believe the cost is 16,000 Euros for a three-year license. It costs a bit more to do the maintenance on our servers as well. It's also on an HP ProLiant server and an organization will need to do the maintenance there also. I believe the price for that is around 2000 Euros a year."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Educational Organization

41%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

11%

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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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

Dell PowerMax vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 35% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 6% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 6% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 6% of the time

More Dell Unity XT Competitors

VMware vSAN vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 52% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 48% of the time

More HPE StoreVirtual Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

June 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT

June 2025

Download Dell Unity XT product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual

June 2025

Download HPE StoreVirtual product report

Also Known As

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

EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity

HPE StoreVirtual, HPE VSA

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

Dell EMC Unity XT is one of the best all-flash storage arrays on the market today. Dell EMC Unity XT arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built for a multi-cloud world. In addition, they support digital transformation, enabling businesses to reach the full potential of their data capital quickly and easily. Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms provide the performance, efficiency, enterprise-class software, and virtualization integrations required for running a wide range of virtualized applications.

Dell EMC Unity XT Features

Dell EMC Unity XT has many valuable key features, including:

Unified storage flexibility: With Dell EMC Unity XT you can consolidate separate storage platforms into a single Unity XT unified storage system via a simple and intuitive (HTML5) management GUI that also connects you to CloudIQ.
All-inclusive data protection: Dell EMC Unity XT offers a reliable way to protect application data with all-inclusive data protection services, including snapshots, data-at-rest drive encryption, replication, thin clones, and dynamic pools.
Software-defined solutions: Dell EMC Unity XT provides software-defined storage and HA for on-prem and in the cloud solutions.
Multi-cloud alignment: With Dell EMC Unity XT you have the ability to build and manage an effective data-first multi-cloud strategy. It allows you to consolidate public and private cloud resources that align with your business goals.
Metro node: This feature enables automated business continuity with zero RPO and RTO. It also provides greater flexibility through multi-platform support and replication to any array and has zero performance impact on the storage array.
Scalable file system: Dell EMC Unity XT is built with a robust 256TBu file system. The UFS64 file system includes up to 256 independent VMDK clones, 16 thin clones, space efficient snapshots with a simple space reclaim and low IO impact, file system shrink that can reclaim free blocks, simplified Quotas for User, and much more.
DevOps integrations: Dell EMC Unity XT supports the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin to run Kubernetes workloads.

Dell EMC Unity XT Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC Unity XT include:

High-speed data access
Low latency
Dual-active controller architecture
Multi-cloud
Intuitive user interface
Cost efficient
Solid performance

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC Unity XT users.

A Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company says, "It is definitely one of the most robust, solid, well-performing products that I have dealt with. It is set it and forget it, which is pretty amazing." He also mentions, “We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device.”

Peter S., Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company, states, “The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs. This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.”

PeerSpot user Melvin T., Senior Systems Engineer at Prosperity Bank, explains that the solution is “easy to use and we can add LUNs or space without interruption to end-users. We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity."

Dell Technologies

HPE StoreVirtual storage ensures that organisations can optimise the benefits of server virtualisation with cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery. The iSCSI-based, scale-out storage platform is easy to manage and change – meeting ongoing business demands without creating IT bottlenecks or application downtime. Overcoming the cost and management limitations of traditional storage area networks (SANs), HPE StoreVirtual nodes use storage clustering to form a single pool of resources that enable organisations to buy only what they need today, scaling non-disruptively to meet requirements in the future.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre

NBrIX, WIND Telecom, Netrics

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: June 2025.

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