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Dell Unity XT vs NetApp AFF 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
14th
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
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
196
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
312
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 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 6.7%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.4%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Q&A Highlights

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Nov 03, 2020
 

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.
Ian Rousom - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible with great support and high-speed multi-protocol storage
Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident. We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability. It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time. We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"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."
"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."
"The solution is scalable."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"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."
"Its quick integration with VMware. The ability to stand up a data store in one place, where you don't have to go and rescan for the data store through the vCenter Client, as well as SMB shares. This ended up being a big selling point for us."
"It will certainly help us scale bigger. If I look at the footprint, the VNX's was multi-rack. Now, all of a sudden, we're only at a portion of a rack. And, obviously, if we can scale within the same rack - we can certainly see that by the number of hard drives we've had to put in - we can scale a lot more easily."
"Integration; We use the product with VMware, and also use it with Syft for home directory and departmental shares."
"Compared to our old platform, everything is more tightly integrated. I don't have to go to different sections to do something. A lot of it is wizard-driven, so it's an easy to use system."
"Veeam Backup integration: Veeam is the defacto standard for backing up of virtual environments."
"We were able to integrate it very quickly with other solutions."
"We currently have two Dell EMC Unities going. One of them at our primary on-premise DR site. They communicate with each other. If we ever have to failover, it is right there and ready."
"We've never had an issue with storage."
"Replication would be one of the most valuable features."
"I think it is a very stable product."
"If you need a replacement part, they will provide it."
"ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do QoS."
"The NetApp technology that has delivered the most value to our organization is FabricPool."
"NetApp AFF's flash technology offers great performance. This feature has been my go-to for managing data and ensuring speed and reliability."
"AFF has improved my organization because we now have better performance. We can scale up and we can create servers a lot faster now. With the storage that we had, it used to take a lot longer, but now we can provide the business what they need a lot faster."
 

Cons

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"In some countries, spare part availability is an issue for us."
"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."
"Our customers are mostly happy with Unity except for the price. We primarily sell to enterprise companies because small companies cannot afford it."
"Stability is the problem. We've had stability issues with it. We've had problems with the iSCSI interface. We've had it for two years now and for two years we've had problems where a service processor will drop, we'll lose connectivity to LUNs, we'll lose connectivity to the storage, issues like that. No matter how we've tried to chase it down, everybody just points fingers at each other. The only thing that changed in our environment was that the Unity solution was installed."
"The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing."
"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 did encounter a firmware bug which actually caused loss of data. There was some heartburn around that. But in general, it has operated as expected, except for that bug."
"We integrated it with vSphere but that integration was "iffy". It was okay but we had a few challenges with it."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"Customer support is a hot-button issue, so we definitely need better customer support. We get some support from our vendor that helps. If the C-Series had a more user-friendly GUI, that would help us get our LUNs built and data storage connected faster."
"A while ago, they performed quite slowly."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"When new ONTAP cloud versions come out, they need to have fewer bugs."
"I would like to improve the ransomware aspect. We get a lot of false positives, and there are no details of what is happening. This seems to be already fixed in the new version."
"We only had a few upgrade issues."
"From my perspective, everything works well. They've already announced that they have some features in their next release that make the existing investment more usable, by adding software features to your existing legacy hardware investment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"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."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"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."
"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 product is expensive."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"Currently, we buy directly from Dell EMC. We've tried going through resellers before, but we've found that if we go directly through Dell EMC, we get a good a price from being with the government."
"There is not a license required for the use of the solution. We purchased a maintenance contract."
"The pricing was quite okay compared to others. We probably got it cheaper because we were the first ones out of the gate, but I would say that it's good value for the money."
"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."
"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."
"The product’s pricing should be improved."
"This solution is a good price for what you get."
"The price is up a little bit from what we used to pay so I'm hoping that it's a little bit of a better system than the VNXe was. But I still think it's a good value. It's new, so I'm sure there's room for the pricing to drop."
"We benefited from implementing all-flash by reducing our data center footprint. We took it from 30 racks to just over five. This is one of the biggest savings for us."
"Other vendors may come in at a cheaper price point, but you will pay in the end with management costs and downtime."
"The solution is moderately priced."
"It consolidates a lot of our storage into one or two chassis, which makes money savings in our data center."
"NetApp AFF is an expensive solution."
"NetApp AFF is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is good."
"It depends on how you look at things, but they are in a higher price range."
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 28, 2015
NetApp vs. XtremIO
Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS? I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive…
 

Answers from the Community

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Nov 3, 2020
Nov 3, 2020
I saw that you have doubts about what you chose. I have a lot of experience with the constructor, honestly I can recommend Dell EMC Unity XT All-flash which can guarantee you a ratio of 3:1 signed by Dell and you have to deploy all types of workload from block to file. You can also rely on the native cash and fast cache functionality for increasing application performance
2 out of 8 answers
CC
Dec 2, 2019
First of all the decision should be taken looking at similar products in terms of capacity and performance. I will show a few aspects helping the decision, comparing Unity Xt480f and AFF220 (both chosen by distributor to be in the price range for capacity): 1. Comparing 2 systems with the same capacity and performance: pricing is the first to look at: 1a. Cost per GB, war capacity and usable capacity (+Unity) 1b. Cost of adding capacity (+Unity) 1c. Cost of licensing per GB / per added capacity (+Unity all included) 1d. Cost of maintenance after initial contract (+Unity same for all life ) 2. Comparison of CPU/MEM, we choose Unity XT because of better CPU cores/frequency and memory per controller 3. Percentage of space lost in various configurations. Our goal was to use Dynamic disk pools, available on Unity. Easier upgrades/downgrades. 4. If virtual volumes are considered, Unity has a VASA provider included in the controller, Netapp is using external VM. 5. Product lifecycle 6. Inline compression / deduplication, performance, From the above 1=80%, 2=5%, 3=10%, 4+5=5% We went to Unity XT480 where on the same budget we got 20% more usable flash capacity, while enough slots remain for future upgrades.
MG
Dec 2, 2019
EMC definitely.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
41%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
4%
Educational Organization
34%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

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...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in t...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended c...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matt...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.