Dell Unity XT vs NetApp AFF A-Series comparison

Dell Technologies and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.6, while NetApp is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.7. Dell Technologies holds a 5.8% mindshare in AFS, compared to NetApp’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and NetApp AFF A-Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp AFF A-Series Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp AFF A-Series

December 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 January 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 1.4%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 5.8%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF A-Series is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Dell Unity XT	5.8%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe	1.4%
NetApp AFF A-Series	0.5%
Other	92.3%

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.

Read full review

Deepak Kannan

Sales Account Manager - BFSI Sector at Frontier Business systems

Customer needs are addressed effectively with collaborative sales and service support

Recently, customers have been asking for a cloud tiering option in storages. Some Dell storages do not have cloud tiering, which is an optional commercial feature. NetApp's FSA model 2750 comes with an inbuilt cloud tiering option. In the future, if Dell storages include this option, especially for Unity, it would help us target SME or medium enterprises for quicker closures and support the sales team.

Read full review

MartinSandell

Senior Storage Engineer at Orange Business

Efficient data management leads to significant cost savings through advanced inline deduplication

NetApp's inline deduplication and compression are unmatched compared to other vendors. With both deduplication and compression inline, we experience no cost in terms of performance on the systems, however, we have huge savings on the storage side. We can turn it on for everyone and save storage space, allowing us to sell more to customers. NetApp also provides us with an interface for VLAN separation that no other vendor can provide, allowing our customers distinct, separated network layers in between.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

"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."

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

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

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"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."

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The most valuable feature is that the solution is a hybrid system, so you can do both block and file storage."

"The most valuable feature is the integration with vCenter."

"The inline deduplication and data reduction capabilities have been the most valuable."

"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."

"It gives me the flexibility with its ability to replicate to itself and the ability to use the Dell EMC Cloud as an option. That's always sitting there and waiting if we need it."

"We have simplified it down to where we're using one storage pool inside the Unity, whereas on the VNX, we had multiple storage pools. This has simplified that aspect for us. It would depend on each organization. We're heavy into VMware and this ties into it so simply. It's made it a lot easier for us. I create a datastore inside Unity, it just shows up in VMware. I love that tie-in."

"It's easy for us to use because we use other solutions which are built for Unity, like VMware, which are recovery points. They work with the Dell EMC Unity system, as these products integrate well in our environment."

"Veeam Backup integration: Veeam is the defacto standard for backing up of virtual environments."

More Dell Unity XT pros

"NetApp support is fantastic."

"NetApp helps us get the fastest output."

"NetApp's inline deduplication and compression are unmatched compared to other vendors."

"The deduplication and compression options from NetApp AFF A-Series are good to use for efficient storage capacity."

"NetApp AFF A-Series is faster and more robust compared to the all-flash storage of NetApp."

"We've reduced downtime. Without all of NetApp's benefits, we would have had to reconfigure parts of storage that would have required downtime. We have dramatically reduced our downtime through successive generations of NetApp, allowing us to get Five 9s availability."

"The amazing thing is that whenever we have come up with an issue where we need to get something done, and it wasn't necessarily available, they could do things for us, usually within the next revision of the software."

"MetroCluster is the best product on the market. It synchronizes the storage. NetApp's update packages are a huge advantage because the firmware and server updates are in one package."

More NetApp AFF A-Series pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."

"The software layer has to improve."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for."

"It would be great if the solution could integrate an NVMe disk."

"We've also encountered an issue when it comes to migrating to compressed LANs on the Unity, and during the Storage vMotion. It appears that the compression algorithm is overwhelmed, and when it becomes overwhelmed it just stops compressing and writes the raw data to the destination. We later copied internally another Storage vMotion to another compressed LAN and achieved much higher compressions on that internal copy. It would be really nice if there was a way to automatically throttle, as a part of a Storage vMotion, to say, "I want to gain the maximum benefits from the compression algorithm, so throttle back the Storage vMotion to implement 100 percent compression.""

"The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication."

"It could be a little easier to attach it to a network file system."

"In some countries, spare part availability is an issue for us."

"Scalability is not good. We have a Unity 300, now we have to do a data-in-place conversion for the next upgrade because only 150 slots are supported, not drives, only slots."

"I would like to see more integration with other products."

More Dell Unity XT cons

"I really don't have a lot of complaints. In the past, there were issues, however, they've really done a great job of reaching out."

"The solution's ransomware protection could be improved."

"Pricing could always be lower."

"We have several problems with the limitations of NetApp systems in terms of volume shares. We have a brick in a 700 or a controller, and we sometimes make small volumes, but Kubernetes container volumes don't allow us."

"NetApp AFF A-Series should work on cost. The solutions, especially enterprise-level storage, should be more affordable to improve their appeal to businesses."

"It would be helpful if our partner organized a yearly session with my team to discuss the new feature sets on our current solutions and other ways NetApp can help us. Perhaps we are missing some information to help us make the right decision."

"NetApp is shifting to the cloud and adopting AI, but it is not improving its core technology to deliver faster storage. We're still waiting to see if it improves speed with solutions like the 90 series."

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."

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

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

"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."

"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 product is expensive."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"We checked both HP and Dell and we determined that Dell EMC was a better option."

"There is not a license required for the use of the solution. We purchased a maintenance contract."

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

"It's the performance combined with the gig-per-dollar value. That combination is superior to other storage options."

"The solution’s pricing is competitive."

"Our CAPEX was close to $42,000 and operating costs are below $1000."

"The flexibility is important. We still have a lot of customers that have a use case for non-flash, yet you can also build the flash version as well."

"Pricing for this product is manageable, though slightly higher than comparable products."

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Government

No data available

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	62
Midsize Enterprise	49
Large Enterprise	94

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Large Enterprise	8

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 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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What needs improvement with NetApp AFF A-Series?

NetApp is doing great with cloud integration; however, there may be room for improvement in integrating with existing...

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What advice do you have for others considering NetApp AFF A-Series?

It would be great to see some automation from NetApp. I rate NetApp AFF A-Series a nine out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp AFF A-Series?

With respect to pricing, NetApp can be competitive but hasn't been explored to a large extent.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 18% of the time

Dell PowerMax vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

TrueNAS X-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 34% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell Unity XT Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF A-Series

Compared 36% of the time

NetApp AFF C-Series vs NetApp AFF A-Series

Compared 35% of the time

Fujitsu Eternus AF Series vs NetApp AFF A-Series

Compared 15% of the time

NetApp ASA vs NetApp AFF A-Series

Compared 14% of the time

More NetApp AFF A-Series Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

January 2026

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT

January 2026

Download Dell Unity XT product report

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

January 2026

Download NetApp AFF A-Series product report

Also Known As

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

EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity

No data available

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

NetApp AFF A-Series is ideal for high-performance storage in enterprise environments. It efficiently handles large-scale data and provides reliable storage for virtual machines, databases, and critical applications.

NetApp AFF A-Series stands out for its speed, reliability, and robust data protection features. Users find its management easy and appreciate the efficiency in handling large workloads. Its seamless integration with cloud services and high data transfer speeds with reduced latency enhance its appeal. Scalability and support for various applications make it a top choice for enterprises. However, there is room for improvement in documentation, technical support response time, and third-party application integration.

What are the standout features of NetApp AFF A-Series?

High Performance: Delivers fast data transfer speeds and reduces latency.
Data Protection: Robust features ensure data integrity and security.
Ease of Management: Simplified administration enhances efficiency.
Cloud Integration: Seamless integration with cloud services.
Scalability: Easily handles growing data and application demands.

What benefits should users look for?

Enhanced Efficiency: Streamlined management processes save time.
Increased Reliability: High reliability ensures continuous operation.
Improved Data Security: Advanced data protection features safeguard information.
Cost-Effective Scaling: Efficiently scales to meet growing storage needs.
Better Cloud Utilization: Leverages cloud capabilities for more flexibility.

NetApp AFF A-Series is implemented across industries to support virtual machines, large databases, and critical applications. It's particularly valuable in financial services for fast transaction processing, in healthcare for managing extensive patient records and imaging data, and in tech companies for supporting development environments and big data analytics.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp AFF A-Series

December 2025

Free Report: Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp AFF A-Series

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp AFF A-Series and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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