Dell XtremIO vs Zadara comparison

Dell Technologies and Zadara are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #21 with an average rating of 8.0, while Zadara is ranked #33 with an average rating of 7.5. Dell Technologies holds a 0.7% mindshare in AFS, compared to Zadara’s 0.3% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zadara users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell XtremIO and Zadara are competitors in the data storage solutions category. However, Zadara seems to hold an advantage due to its flexibility and ease of use.

Features: Dell XtremIO is noted for excellent performance and scalability, making it ideal for high-demand environments. It is praised for robust features and support. Zadara is valued for its versatile storage options, seamless scalability, and integrated cloud services. It offers public, private, and hybrid cloud storage solutions, with users finding its flexibility and integrated cloud services more beneficial.

Room for Improvement:Dell XtremIO users point out issues with upgrades, the need for improved intuitive management, and a more streamlined upgrade process. Zadara could benefit from enhanced documentation, better price transparency, and refining its documentation. Dell might improve its upgrade processes and intuitive management, while Zadara should focus on its price structure.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell XtremIO users appreciate its responsive customer support but find the initial deployment complex. Zadara offers straightforward deployment, efficient customer service, and an overall easier setup experience. While Dell has strong support, Zadara provides a more user-friendly deployment process and responsive service.

Pricing and ROI: Dell XtremIO users mention higher setup costs but satisfactory ROI for enterprise-scale needs. Zadara is noted for its lower setup costs and superior ROI due to its flexible subscription-based pricing model.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell XtremIO vs. Zadara Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO vs. Zadara

July 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 August 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.9%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell XtremIO is 0.7%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zadara is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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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Stanislaw Jagielski

Trainer, Storage Consultant at Oxon

Efficient and straightforward setup boosts data management capabilities

Scalability is a significant feature of Dell XtremIO, as it is easy to expand and manage. It provides a lot of features suited for complex systems, such as scalability and the ability to define multi-domain systems, which are beneficial for data management and storage separation. It is efficient from the customer's point of view, offering deduplication at both the volume and file levels. The configuration and setup are straightforward, provided one has knowledge in setting up network infrastructure like VLANs. It is easy to install, use, and configure, making it a reliable product.

Read full review

Kirubel Behailu

Cloud System Engineer at cloud251

Enhancing storage management efficiency with user-friendly experience

Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage. I typically use it for our infrastructure and offer both Zadara and Microsoft Azure to our customers Zadara…

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

"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."

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

"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."

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

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

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

"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"Initially, we faced numerous issues with our analytical systems. However, we saw performance improvement after the implementation of the solution."

"Snapshots are valuable because of their seamless nature, as well as the minimal space each snapshot takes."

"The performance is good, which is important."

"The solution's most valuable features are the inline data reduction and deduplication."

"Dell XtremIO is good for databases and huge workloads."

"The most valuable features are: complete performance and ease of use."

"The most valuable features are that it is fast and reliable."

"We've seen great enhancements from the performance point of view. There's good availability, stability, and continuity, but the performance actually has increased by 60 or 70%."

More Dell XtremIO pros

"It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed."

"The most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed."

"A nice feature is the immutable object storage, which can be used in conjunction with Veeam."

"It provides very satisfactory storage performance."

"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."

"Zadara saves both time and money."

"I find Zadara's user-friendliness from both the customer and engineering perspectives highly appreciated."

"One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections."

More Zadara pros

Cons

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

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

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

"We need better data deduplication."

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

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."

"The software layer has to improve."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The product is highly expensive. Additionally, there is a significant lack of training, support documents, and forums available for Dell XtremIO, making troubleshooting difficult for third-party individuals."

"The product could be improved by reducing the pricing and having better organization in their technical support team."

"In some cases where we don’t need the flexibility of the virtualization layer, we could free up resources on the VPLEX by using the storage replication."

"I would like to see the ease of deployment and built-in Metro clustering."

"The interface could be simplified for beginners to ease the configuration of special objects in the system."

"XtremIO is coming to its end of life."

"This solution is geared toward enterprise-level companies. Small and medium-sized businesses would find it extremely expensive."

"It can be more cost-efficient."

More Dell XtremIO cons

"The initial setup of the solution is complex."

"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."

"I would like to see them be a little bit more proactive in terms of the patches and updates that are available. I would like to see more disclosure and information around what fixes or what enhancements are available within a patch, and help in coordinating and scheduling that. Right now, it's driven more by the customer in reaching out via a support ticket."

"The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can also be complicated, especially when deeper troubleshooting requires navigating the CLI and searching for logs."

"Currently, when we do firmware upgrades, it sometimes causes issues and is not as nondisruptive as desired."

"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve."

"There is room for improvement in pricing as it is currently quite expensive."

"Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product."

More Zadara cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

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

"The product is expensive."

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

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

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"XtremIO is an all-flash array, which means it's a costly solution. When compared with general mid-range storage solutions, this is more expensive. As far as I know, there are no additional costs besides the license."

"The price of the solution should be reduced. The price matches the price of a VMAX service but it does not have the capability of a VMAX service. However, the prices of Dell EMC XtremIO can be reduceable."

"Pricing and licensing are in line with other products from other manufacturers. You get what you pay for."

"The license for XtremIO is in the box, so you don't have to buy anything."

"This is the best flash array on the market for high-end workloads, so expect to pay for that. But the support subscription cost is fixed for seven years, which made it easier for us to plan on the maintenance costs."

"There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"The licensing cost is on a yearly subscription basis, which can be expensive but is necessary for ongoing support and services. The pricing could be improved to make it more accessible."

"Licensing is approximately $200,000 per year."

More Dell XtremIO pricing and cost advice

"For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."

"The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."

"It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."

"One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."

"If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."

"The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."

"The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."

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Comparison Review

it_user182013

Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at Rubrik

May 1, 2015

Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR

Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

21%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Government

Comms Service Provider

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.

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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 do you like most about Dell EMC XtremIO?

The feature I like most about Dell Xtremio is its hardware quality compared to other vendors. It's clear they're cont...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell XtremIO?

Pricing is hard to determine as it depends on the given configuration. XtremIO offers features that justify a potenti...

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What needs improvement with Dell XtremIO?

The interface could be simplified for beginners to ease the configuration of special objects in the system. While the...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Zadara?

The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Zadara?

I use this product as storage. Specifically, I use it as big storage. That's the main use case for Zadara ( /products...

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What advice do you have for others considering Zadara?

As for the pros and cons, the main concerns are the complexity of the initial installation and the complicated mainte...

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Comparisons

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Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerMax vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 13% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

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Dell PowerStore vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 20% of the time

Dell PowerMax vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 15% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 10% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 8% of the time

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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Zadara

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon S3 vs Zadara

Compared 17% of the time

MinIO vs Zadara

Compared 16% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs Zadara

Compared 8% of the time

Wasabi vs Zadara

Compared 8% of the time

More Zadara Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

August 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO

August 2025

Download Dell XtremIO product report

Buyer's Guide

Zadara

July 2025

Download Zadara product report

Also Known As

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

Dell EMC XtremIO Flash, Dell EMC XtremIO X2, XtremIO, XtremIO X2

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

Bring all-flash, scale-out storage to your enterprise applications with EMC XtremIO. Purpose-built for flash, XtremIO storage arrays are amazingly fast. Delivering high IOPS at less than 1 millisecond latency is just the start. EMC XtremIO helps you harness the power of flash storage by building in innovations like content-based data placement and dual-stage metadata.

Dell Technologies

Zadara is a powerful enterprise-level storage solution whose design enables it to handle every aspect of a user’s data storage needs. It can be deployed in any location, using any protocol, and storing any data type that an organization requires. With Zadara, organizations can do everything that they were able to do with more traditional systems in a cheaper and more efficient way.

Zadara Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Zadara include:

Security. Zadara is built with data security in mind. All of a user’s data is heavily encrypted by Zadara’s software so that it is safe both while it is in storage and while it is being transferred somewhere else. It comes with role-based access controls that prevent a user’s data from being seen by those who lack the proper level of authorization. It also comes with dual-factor authentication and other similar methods of identity management.

Reduced costs. While Zadara offers enterprise-level storage capabilities, the costs associated with utilizing it are far less than those of similar solutions. Some of the resources that it offers are totally free of cost. The model that it utilizes is a pay-as-you-go model. Organizations only pay for the resources that they use and nothing more. Users are not required to sign up for any particular period of time. They are in complete and total control of what they spend on the solution.

Storage efficiency. Zadara ensures that users are able to store their data in the most efficient way possible. It takes a number of approaches that prevent insufficient data storage. These approaches are:

1. Thin-provision volumes. This method only allows actually written data to be counted toward the storage capacity that is consumed.

2. Pattern removal. Zadara searches a user’s stored data for repetitive binary sequences. Once it identifies the repetitive binary sequences, it deletes them.

3. Inline deduplication (all-flash only). This method ensures that Zadara only stores unique data blocks in its system.

4. Inline compression. Zadara takes data that is stored in its system and compresses it. This keeps larger blocks of data from taking up too much room.

Zadara Features

Centralized management. Zadara comes with a centralized dashboard that enables organizations to monitor and control their storage operations from a single location.

File analytics. Organizations can leverage a powerful analytics package that can provide them with critical insights. These tools can help users sort through their data and make more informed data management decisions.

Remote mirroring. This feature enables users to replicate data in two remote locations at the same time. This makes it easy for data to be recovered in the event of an unexpected loss. It also aids remote teams in their collaboration efforts by giving them access to the same data at the same time.

Reviews from Real Users

Zadara is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its extensive suite of cloud solution integrations and its object storage capability.

Steve H., the chief technology officer at Pratum, writes, “One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage computer instances there. Being able to integrate with computing, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections.”

Mauro R., the CEO of Momit SRL, says, “The object storage feature is wonderful. With traditional storage, you have a cost per gigabyte that is extremely high or related to the number of disks. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you have a cost per gigabyte that you can cut and tailor to your needs independent of the number or size of the disks.”

Zadara

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Raiffeisen Bank Bulgaria, Wentworth-Douglas Hospital

Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO vs. Zadara

July 2025

Free Report: Dell XtremIO vs. Zadara

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