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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
15th
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
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
194
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
311
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 7.8%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.3%, 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.
Anna Sofo - PeerSpot reviewer
Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency
I like NetApp AFF's deduplication. The solution's AutoSupport feature is efficient and effective because customers are notified of potential issues before they experience problems with NetApp. The support is sold based on metro clusters, so they guarantee the client's business continuity. NetApp has an Active IQ app that allows you to get information on your smartphone.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."
"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."
"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."
"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."
"It is scalable. Customers are going more into distributed architecture, so the Unity definitely has a scalable architecture built into that."
"The technical support is very professional and provides quick responses."
"It is easy to manage. Managing it, I get alerts if there are any type of issues. I had a hard drive go bad, which had never caused any issues. Dell EMC contacted me, and said, "We are a shipping a new one out." My response was, "Why?" He told me that hard drive was bad. So, I went and looked, and it was. This was almost immediate. I never even knew anything had happened."
"I don't think I've ever seen latencies above 10 milliseconds unless it was something that wasn't the array that was messing up. The thing is rock-solid."
"All-flash array eliminates all the overhead of tiering and a lot of the data structuring overhead involved."
"We have simplified it down to where we're using one storage pool inside the Unity, whereas on the VNX, we had multiple storage pools. This has simplified that aspect for us. It would depend on each organization. We're heavy into VMware and this ties into it so simply. It's made it a lot easier for us. I create a datastore inside Unity, it just shows up in VMware. I love that tie-in."
"Performance is a top feature."
"The solution allows for easy, useful replication with good features for VPLEX and VIVO."
"The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options."
"From my standpoint, NetApp AFF is the most powerful enterprise solution. I find it to be highly flexible, allowing me to do whatever I want."
"There are many reports accessing the applications. We receive them very quickly. We used to wait a long time for them. Now, you just need to wait a moment."
"Organizations can reduce data storage footprint and lower power and cooling costs, helping to adopt "Green IT.""
"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."
"The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning."
"The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"We are a large-scale company, and our growth has been pretty significant over the last five or six years. We like the scale, and the way NetApp grows, so that's why we use it. It's mostly for block storage."
 

Cons

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."
"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."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"Software updates have to be downloaded to the root of the device. This pushes the available space to 95% utilization."
"This product needs to have better integration with enterprise backup solutions and archiving devices."
"I would like the UI to look better."
"Perhaps if they added more 10GB ports to the back of the system, so you have more IOPS out of the box itself to the network, that would help."
"The solution should include a free process in the HPE portal that uses serial numbers to verify that hardware is genuine."
"Include cloud-based replication for blocks"
"It would be better if there were more integrations."
"This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for."
"The procurement process could be improved. It takes a long time for us to receive stuff. The product is good. It's not the product, it's just that it takes forever to get it. It's not our reseller's problem; it's usually held up at NetApp."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
"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."
"I have experienced slow responses several times, if the ticket has only been opened in portal."
"The product has size limitations on fax volume. They have increased from 100 to 300, which is still less than other vendors. Or flex groups are not supported."
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"I would like NetApp to be more aware of organizations that don't run it on a public cloud. Everything is built on the cloud, so if you want to run BlueXP in an environment like ours, it's a real pain because it wants to host too much info on the cloud."
"I would like it to be an IP as our network is mainly IP-based."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Our costs are roughly $200,000 a year."
"It is a good return on investment."
"Pricing is as high as it has ever been for EMC."
"It is shipped with all licensed, included for this product range, no need to buy additional licenses"
"We bought extended warranties out of the box because our customer has a bad habit of managing warranties."
"This unit is one of the cheapest storage all-flash arrays in the market and it does well for what it is intended. It can be combined for both file and block storage."
"The support you're getting with it is probably an underestimated value that comes with the box you're buying."
"The pricing is reasonable. We're using the Flex on Demand pricing. It's really good for us when we pay for what we use. It made it easy to get it inside since it's an OpEx and instead of CapEx expense."
"The solution is moderately priced."
"It's expensive. it's in the hundreds of thousands. It's beneficial, but at times, I feel compared to other vendors, we are paying a premium for the licensing that other vendors include."
"You need to be careful with the licensing since it can become expensive."
"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."
"The list price of AFF is too expensive... they need to be careful with the pricing of the new NVMe disks. They are way too expensive."
"NetApp AFF is an expensive solution."
"From an application standpoint, we have seen a lot of return investment on the speeds and responsiveness of the actual storage."
"In addition to simplifying the management across a mix of solutions, AFF simplifies the cost. That was one of the main reasons we purchased AFF."
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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
70%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Government
2%
Educational Organization
71%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
3%
 

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: April 2025.
847,646 professionals have used our research since 2012.