Dell Unity XT vs Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array comparison

Dell Technologies and Pavilion are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.6, while Pavilion is ranked #38. Dell Technologies holds a 6.3% mindshare in AFS, compared to Pavilion’s 0.3% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Pavilion users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell Unity XT and Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array are both high-performing storage solutions with unique strengths and areas for improvement. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array seems to have the upper hand due to users highlighting its advanced features and superior speed, making it worth the extra cost.

Features: Dell Unity XT users value its reliability, ease of integration, and performance metrics. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array users highlight its superior speed, advanced data services, and scalability. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array offers more cutting-edge features which many users find appealing despite the higher price.

Room for Improvement: Dell Unity XT users suggest enhancements in firmware stability, management tools, and faster software updates. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array users point out the need for improved documentation, a better learning curve for new users, and more user-friendly interfaces.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell Unity XT is praised for its straightforward deployment process and responsive customer support. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array also receives positive feedback for deployment ease but stands out with specialized support and comprehensive assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Dell Unity XT users are satisfied with the competitive setup cost and see a quick return on investment. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array users note a higher initial setup cost but find the long-term benefits and ROI compelling due to its robust performance.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Unity XT vs. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT vs. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array

September 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 October 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 1.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 6.3%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array is 0.3%, up from 0.2% 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	6.3%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe	1.0%
Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array	0.3%
Other	92.4%

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.

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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 uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."

"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."

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

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

"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."

"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

"It is simple to use and easy to manage. We don't touch it after we set it up."

"The Unity XT box is very strong. It doesn't break. The MTBF time is very large so you don't have to worry about faults or outages in your operations."

"We put the Unity on one of the file servers and the backup performance improved quite a lot."

"In the hybrid version, I would say they are fast. They have fully automated storage tiering. In the all-flash version, higher performance, compression, data replication."

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

"The scalability is really good now that they have the Dynamic Pools. We don't always have the money to buy complete write sets when we have to expand the storage, so now with the Dynamic Pools we can add disks on the go."

"We particularly like the user interface on cloud IQ with this product."

"For our customers, it's the simplicity of it. They find it easy to use, along with the added features, the dynamic volumes."

More Dell Unity XT pros

"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."

"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."

Cons

"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."

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

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

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

"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Data replication needs improvement as the future roadmap for RecoverPoint appliance is not there."

"Scalability for the 650F is good, but I was expecting a little bit more."

"There are some features in VNX that I wish were in the Unity. For example, Storage Groups for isolating LANs and hosts. That is a big issue."

"Support Responsiveness & time to fix bugs should be improved."

"The one thing that we would look at would be if they were to expand the file level features, just to give us a balance or a tier between it and Isilon options out there, for unstructured data."

"Licensing has been quite difficult. It doesn't always auto-license. About half the time, when I provision one, I have to contact Service to get a license, or even go to our account manager to help get it straightened out."

"It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there."

"I would like the device to have the ability to pull down its own firmware. That would be a great thing."

More Dell Unity XT cons

"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."

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

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"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'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."

"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."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The only improvement would be a lower cost per unit/disks, however on the whole we are very pleased with this product."

"The pricing is competitive. We miss some of the feature functionality that we had with the XtremeIOs but it's certainly suitable for the purpose."

"What they really like is the easy licensing now - Dell EMC has caught up to a lot of their competitors - based on not having to charge for everything, and they can get everything in one bundle."

"While Dell EMC is costly, I don't have any complaints about their licensing model."

"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."

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

"For costing, you have to have a budget in mind because SANs can be fairly expensive and EMC offers a wide range of products."

"We purchased a five-year warranty."

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The licensing fees are very reasonable."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

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	61
Midsize Enterprise	49
Large Enterprise	94

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.

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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...

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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 ...

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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 23% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

Dell PowerMax vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 13% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

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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 5% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell Unity XT Competitors

No data available

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

September 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT

October 2025

Download Dell Unity XT product report

Buyer's Guide

Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array

September 2025

Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array report

Download Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array product 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)

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT vs. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array

September 2025

Free Report: Dell Unity XT vs. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Unity XT vs. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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