Dell Unity XT vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell Unity XT
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
190
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pure Storage FlashArray
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
174
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 10.8%, up from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure Storage FlashArray is 6.4%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
Unique Categories:
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
3.9%
No other categories found
No other categories found
 

Featured Reviews

DA
May 21, 2021
Reasonably priced, scales well, and offers good stability
We primarily use the solution for cluster applications and databases. We use the solution on the DBA and those that use double machines Being able to have broken files on-site on the same appliance is quite useful. The newer version of NVME has a really noticeable difference in quality versus the…
MS
Aug 16, 2023
Seamless and user-friendly experience for small or mid-level businesses at reasonable price
We are using it as a unified storage solution for different workloads, databases, and data backup It provides simplified deployment, monitoring and management of storage resources. It is very user-friendly.  Facilitated optimization of the storage utilization is a really good benefit.  One of…
SC
Sep 3, 2019
A simple, reliable, and high-performance solution for hosting VMware workloads
This initial setup and deployment are pretty straightforward. For the setup, it is very simple to populate the information. We had a workbook that was provided by Pure to give to the customer to gather all of the details. That made the implementation very straightforward. The one thing that was a little bit annoying was the fact that we still had to come back through Pure to get the software. A lot of our other partners, we can just download it ourselves, and as long as we've got the process, we can go and do it ourselves. But, in this scenario, we still had to come back through Pure to actually get the software.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"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."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The most valuable feature is the fast cache with functionality rewrite."
"It is pretty stable. I like the stability, because everything works like it should. We made it all redundant. So, we don't have anything to worry about."
"It does great deduplication. From a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk"
"The setup and installation procedures are easy."
"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."
"It is completely reliable. The plugins for it are quite mature. I don't really have any issues with the interactions with vSphere, they all work as intended."
"Dell EMC Unity XT has good integration with VMware."
"Integration is easy with this product."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"I like the speed, and I like the API and how programmable it is."
"Performance is the most valuable feature."
"We also use VMware integrations developed by Pure, their plugins in our vCenter environment. They help by allowing our non-technical operations teams to deploy new data stores and resize data stores without me having to involve myself all the time to do those simple tasks."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."
"The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure."
"My rating of Pure Storage is a ten out of ten because of the price for performance and footprint - the overall value."
 

Cons

"It is on the expensive side."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"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."
"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."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"I would like to see a more seamless virtual box integration with the physical box which can replicate, because the setup of the replication is very difficult right now."
"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."
"We need to improve the controller to work as active-active. We also need to improve the snapshot on the Unity site."
"Firmware Upgrades in EMC Unity require you to manually download OS and Drive firmware, this should be integrated (Nimble does this). When you order an EMC Unity, you have to specify the block size. This is weird for me and even weirder that you cannot change this afterwards, you should be able to specify per LUN/datastore (Nimble does this as well)."
"The EMC VNX Virtual Data Mover (VDM) software needs more improvement."
"You can't use every feature, because it costs in performance. Therefore, you have to choose which features to use to achieve a better environment. That is why customers do not use every feature in Unity."
"We had one incident with a memory leak that led to controller reboot. Although it had no impact, when such things happens the storage should be more aware of it, send alerts, and propose corrective actions."
"​Improve the interface and provide more management capability."
"I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier."
"The price should be lower."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"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 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."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"While Dell EMC is costly, I don't have any complaints about their licensing model."
"We bought extended warranties out of the box because our customer has a bad habit of managing warranties."
"This solution offers great pricing."
"One of the most valuable features is its cost. It was inexpensive compared to other arrays that we were looking at."
"While it has a good price to start, they could always make it cheaper."
"It's an expensive solution, particularly for medium companies. One device costs about 30,000 euros. The support contract is quite expensive as well. We are currently looking for other lower-cost solutions."
"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."
"My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing."
"I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm dong right now again."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years."
"In terms of other contemporary arrays, Pure is something you need to have a use case for, as it's not priced for you to buy one off-the-shelf. If you have a use case, heavy lift Oracle Databases, any type of noticeable virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or need low latency and high throughput, you should consider all-flash at least and probably Pure Storage."
"Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
67%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Government
3%
Educational Organization
32%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
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 se...
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products ...
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...
Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashArray?
We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Unity XT vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.