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Dell PowerStore vs Dell Unity XT 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 PowerStore
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
85
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (4th), NAS (2nd), Enterprise SAN (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
Dell Unity XT
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
196
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 PowerStore is 17.3%, up from 16.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 7.3%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

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.
Brian Ricci - PeerSpot reviewer
It's constantly enhanced and has impressive reliability and data compression
The maintenance is a bit expensive. The service and support are there for three years, but after the third year, it is pretty pricey for renewal. I hope Dell addresses that. Everything is pricey these days anyway. It is not like the old days of Compellent. We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"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."
"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 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."
"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"The most valuable features are the three-to-one data reduction and the ability to scale out and up."
"The latency and the security are the most valuable features of Dell PowerStore."
"The most valuable aspects of Dell PowerStore are the promising roadmap, and the interesting features to come."
"You can add compute and capacity independently. We have sized the solution based on our current needs, but in the future we can choose to increase capacity if we grow our activity in the market. And if we have more business in our monetary system, we can increase compute. The ability to choose what we increase is a good feature."
"The most valuable features of Dell PowerStore are the support for NVMe and SCM, which provides end-to-end performance and high IOPS, minimizing latency. It is a full-fledged storage solution."
"Overall, we're quite happy with the product because we can move the data that is stored on more than 10 of our current storage devices to a single PowerStore."
"The most valuable feature is the encryption in the loop because we can manage data center data from a different perspective, reducing the space used while growing data using the same equipment."
"Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against those of all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have."
"There has been no downtime. It has built-in redundancy upon redundancy."
"It is great because it can work as a SAN and net storage."
"The valuable features of Unity include that it's flexible, has a friendly user-interface, and provides good performance."
"The All-Flash models are pretty fast for the vast majority of our remote workloads."
"This product is perfect for small, and mid-range customers who need to pay less, but still, get enterprise-level capabilities."
"We put the Unity on one of the file servers and the backup performance improved quite a lot."
"The initial setup is very easy. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with vCenter."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"There could be better reporting."
"Dell PowerStore currently only allows us to copy data from our main production system to the disaster recovery site."
"The setup process could be improved. We had some issues regarding configuration and the time it took to do things. It wasn't specifically the people we worked with, but more the process and how it's done. They can work on that."
"Dell PowerStore can improve the integration with VMware."
"We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that."
"The NAS part is very poor. It's very basic. Even Dell EMC has said that to us. We are waiting for version 3 of PowerStore for that. This must be improved and it is in the roadmap."
"Dell PowerStore is too expensive, and it could be less complicated. It isn't as user-friendly as other options, especially regarding the user interface."
"The data resiliency and cybersecurity features of Dell PowerStore are just normal and would be considered medium; we need additional components such as cybersecurity vault for increased resilience."
"We are running VMware, and with the VNXe it was possible to restore. We're using Veeam for VMware backups and with the predecessor, it was possible to mount a backup or restore a backup from a storage snapshot. With the Unity 300, this is not possible."
"I called about an issue where I couldn't get VVOLs registered. It turns out it is a bug in the code and that there is no information about when it will be fixed. It's just not going to work. I was a little miffed about that."
"The uses of tools to communicate with EMC directly. With EMC, I am not able to connect and resolve issues without assistance, so they can't do unattended maintenance on devices, which would be a massive benefit if they could."
"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."
"It's not as reliable as it should be, I think it was probably released a little early. We've had production problems with customers, and there are still some challenges at scale as well. Compression is a problem for the system. Once you enable dedupe and compression, the performance of the system, the capability, halves... It has to be right-sized and sized for compression, but even with that, because there are only two storage processors, you're ending up at almost 40 percent usage."
"Our request to Dell EMC for improvement was in the reporting and monitoring areas. Dell EMC built up a cloud ID so that we could see the overall storage numbers. We needed to have the proper KPIs to be able to see and manage things."
"I would like them to continue to build on the solution and expand on the functionality, like replication."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"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 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'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."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"We only have a single machine and we are currently using half of the hard disk slots. We have asked for an upgrade for the rest of the hard disks but, from my point of view, it costs too much. We have 12 to 15 hard disks inside and if we try to upgrade only the hard disks, it costs the same as the complete system. This is something I don't understand."
"With compression, we were able to have a solution within our company's budget. We include a clause in the contract with Dell that states if the compression ratio is not met, we will adjust the workload accordingly."
"There are no separate licenses required as all the basic licenses are included in the bundle."
"Licensing is very simple. Everything is included in the basic license. There are no concerns about having to pay to add a feature. Everything is there."
"Dell PowerStore is affordable and the license is just a face license which is great."
"In the pricing and licensing department, the product is always too expensive."
"We are currently using Dell PowerStore for our smaller storage and there is no competition for pricing."
"The solution’s pricing is always too high."
"Pricing is as high as it has ever been for EMC."
"The solution should be cheaper."
"The solution’s pricing is competitive."
"I rate Dell Unity XT’s pricing a nine out of ten."
"Looking at it based on cost per gigabyte, it's certainly very effective."
"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."
"It was easy to order. We are a big Dell shop, so it was easy to purchase and get it in place, then up and running."
"From an ROI perspective, I'll put it this way: When we've tried to buy other SANs, the Unity ROI makes it impossible to buy them. So usually, the only time we buy another SAN is when the ROI isn't a factor, because Unity can't do the job. From an ROI perspective, it's great because it beats everything else out. We've tried to look at other options but, at the end of the day, when you price it out, the Unity wins."
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Answers from the Community

YC
Sep 20, 2023
Sep 20, 2023
Hello Yasin, The best solution depends upon your host environment. In general, PowerStore is more powerful than Unity but Unity is also a very good Storage solution.
See 2 answers
ST
Sep 19, 2023
The Unity 300/400/600 generation (1st) is really old stuff, lateron came the 2nd generation of 350f,450f,650f (hybrid or full flash) and still later cam in the 3rd generation 380f, 480f,680f & 880f As usual the CPO/Cores and cache increased everytime, the code is pretty much the same. The x00 generation is already obsolete and by next year the next generation x50 is going to be obsolete from a service point of view. Here is how it goes. Dell Puts forward to replace * the Unity XT 380F by an Powerstore 500T * the Unity XT 480F by a Powerstore 1200 * The Unity XT 680f by a Powerstore 3200 * The unity XT 800f by a Powerstore 5200 There is even a Powerstore 9200 Currently you have the Unity x80 model, which has more CPU punch and therefore maxes out less fast on CPU utilisation. What this means is that you can add more shelves and disks and workloads to it before you hit the roof.   The powerstore 1200 is an nvme/FC but NAS storage as well, is 60% more powerfull (compared to FC/SCSI-SSD on Unity) in our case, and has higher datareduction rates. If the unity reaches out to a datareduction rate of 1.5 or 2, the Powerstore T1200 is capable of 3 to 3.5 datareduction. the Powerstore offloads its compression/deduplication efforts from the Processor to a hardware component in charge of it (like the PowerMAX and likely the same device and Compression Algorithm). The price of the device is pretty much dependant on the price of its media, and therefore the Powerstore T1200 is the absolute winner as you can double the data saved to it compared to the Unity alternative. There is one caveat, when you initialise your Powerstore you either initialise it as a NAS or Block Device appliance. Whereas on the Unity part, you could use both options at the same time.. Another aspect is that the Powerstore can be used to build a cluster of arrays compared to the sync/asynch replication only feature of the Unity series, rendering the mirrored volumes unuseable unless one fails over to it, like in a disaster recovery scenario.To you can , have true Active/Active volumes and go next level with MetroCluster volumes and go beyond VMware Site Reovery Manager to organise your failover/test failovers and protection groups. You can actually leave aside VMware Site Recovery manager and do all from within Powerstore and use its Recoverpoint for VMs add on (similar to Veaam replication but a with an storage appliance in support. The Powerstore also allows true A/A volumes on both sides . What this means is that one can build stretched vSphere clusters and the loss of your array in one site will still allow writing to the alternate protected disk, transparently ! You can have site local writes to your volumes and remain in sync without a need to cross site write. There is not much of a reason to settle for the Unity anymore, unless you would go for a mixed chassis providing both Block Storage & FileSharing. Unity allocates RAM ressources dynamically when used for FC/SCSI AND NAS , whereas the Powerstore is initialized as either a NAS or BlockStorage at installation time. Thats a hard call. So I'd favour the Unity only if you use it for low/moderate NAS needs in combination with FC/SCSI or block data and you don't have the budget nor the size to use a NAS optimised array on top.
Md. ImranulHoque - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 20, 2023
Hello Yasin,  The best solution depends upon your host environment. In general, PowerStore is more powerful than Unity but Unity is also a very good Storage solution.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
65%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Government
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 do you think about Dell EMC PowerStore? Is it actually a new product?
PowerStore is flexible, scalable, simple, and performant with market-leading economics for a wide range of legacy and...
How does Dell's EMC PowerStore compare with its EMC Unity XT?
Dell EMC PowerStore is a unified storage platform that has the added benefit of being scalable. The automated managem...
What's the difference between DELL EMC Powerstore and Powermax NVMe?
Dell PowerStore is an all-solid-state midrange storage system. It has many internal elements taken from other Dell of...
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...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
PowerStore
EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. Dell Unity XT and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,491 professionals have used our research since 2012.