Dell Unity XT vs Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array comparison

Dell Unity XT vs. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array

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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 May 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 7.3%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

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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it_user1534224

Manager of Production Systems at a media company with 10,001+ employees

Good support, improves performance, scales well, and boosts team efficiency

For us, in terms of what is very important, is keeping pace with the evolution of the new standards. For example, as PCI Express 4.0 becomes more ubiquitous, moving into PCI Express 5 is important. Having an architecture that can truly utilize 200-gig or maybe 400-gig networking, or having storage densities in line with what we would expect in a Gen 4, Gen 5 PCI Express, are things that as they come available, I hope that the vendor is looking at that going into the future. We need this because we're really at the point where our workloads are about to explode outwards. I would like to see the management layer improved. HyperOS 3.0 is excellent, and this is important because one of the things that we looked at in the beginning, before HyperOS 3.0 had been released, was that this is an excellent technology and it's very versatile, but it would be great if we could run certain things on this box. It would be helpful if there were more ways to consume the APIs or if there were some ways to get into the hardware, get into the functionality of the system programmatically, or have flexibility where, for example, we just need to do quick namespaces, or something similar. We don't want to deploy an entire secondary storage layer on top of this. Rather, we just want to run something quick. Having a containerized system or having some sort of first-party support for basic storage functionality, or basic extensibility would be excellent for us. In many ways, these boxes are very malleable. It's a blank slate, but having a little more in terms of, if you want more directed use of it, having some way to really get at that, would be helpful.

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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."

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."

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

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

"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."

"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

"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."

"Its main advantage over vSAN was the rebuild, the intelligence of the restoration in the event of a hardware drive failure and, of course, the all-flash solution."

"When I have an issue and need technical support, I reach out to them either through chat or by submitting a service request, and the response is good."

"The NAS capability is mainly what we're looking for from this product, and being able to recover fast in DR."

"The most valuable feature is the fast cache with functionality rewrite."

"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."

"On the Data Domain side, the most attractive feature is the compression ratio, which none of the other products in the market are currently able to provide. On the Unity side, what customers mostly like is the availability guarantee."

"It has good performance."

More Dell Unity XT pros

"We have been able to consolidate storage into Pavilion. Pavilions are our only SANs because it is a bring your own disk solution. When new drives come out, we are able to take out half of the drives in the system, put in new drives, move our VMs over to the new drives, take the other drives out, and populate those with new drives. Then, we are suddenly twice as dense as we were before. NVMe flash is only going to get denser and cheaper so we can make use of that every couple of years by just throwing newer disks into it at a fraction of the cost of a new SAN."

"There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint."

"The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features."

Cons

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

"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."

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

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."

"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."

"We need better data deduplication."

"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The Host LUN ID is sequential by access in the hosts. When one LUN needs access by many hosts (for cluster purposes), in some cases the Host LUN ID remains different on each host."

"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."

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

"We'd like to see a cheaper version of an all-flash array in that footprint."

"This is a tier-three solution and it gives us what we need for archiving and backups."

"It isn't easy to find trusted partners for the product. The solution has issues with mid-level storage and does not come with enterprise storage."

"The initial setup is not so straightforward if you don't have experience with storage arrays."

"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."

More Dell Unity XT cons

"The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint."

"I would like to see the management layer improved."

"In our current configuration, we can only run the line controllers in high availability, active-standby mode, whereas we would like to see active-active implemented."

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."

"The product is expensive."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"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."

"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."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The price of Dell Unity XT is reasonable. However, if you are buying a custom solution, it can come at a considerable price."

"The support you're getting with it is probably an underestimated value that comes with the box you're buying."

"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."

"This product is cheaper than the EMC VNX solution. It is good for small businesses."

"The return on the investment was simply speeding up our entire vSphere stack, which allowed our developers and engineers to get their workloads done faster and simpler. We were experiencing VM snapshot times of 45 minutes to two or three hours, and it shrunk it down to under five minutes."

"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."

"The solution is very expensive."

"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."

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

"The licensing fees are very reasonable."

"This is hardware. They have a singular array that you can populate with your own disk, or you can buy the disks through them. For controllers, you pay for the components inside of the SAN, but there is only one chassis that they work with."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Educational Organization

66%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

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...

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Comparisons

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IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

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Dell PowerStore vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 38% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

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No data available

Product Reports

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Download Dell Unity XT product report

Dell Unity XT

May 2025

Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array

Download Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array product report

Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array report

Also Known As

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

EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity

Pavilion HFA

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

Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform

The Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform™ dramatically accelerates what organizations achieve by delivering universally unmatched storage performance, in an incredibly compact solution while reducing data center costs and complexity. Unrivaled flexibility for multiple data types and protocols, along with broad ecosystem integration, ensure that every customer has choice and control.

What is the Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform

The Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform is comprised of the Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array™ and Pavilion HyperOS™. The Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array leverages a unique, switch-based architecture to create a multi-controller solution that delivers an unmatched combination of high performance, ultra-low latency, and storage density. Pavilion HyperOS is a powerful, purpose-built storage operating system designed to unlock the power of the multi-controller Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array, which delivers scalability and flexibility that no other solution can offer.

Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform Data Sheet

Download the Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform data sheet. Updated: December 2020

Pavilion

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Statistics Netherlands (CBS)

Dell Unity XT vs. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array