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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
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
196
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 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 Unity XT is 7.3%, down from 10.2% 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

"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 most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"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."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"It is ease to use. It performs. It's easy to provision, and It's stable."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"Its quick integration with VMware. The ability to stand up a data store in one place, where you don't have to go and rescan for the data store through the vCenter Client, as well as SMB shares. This ended up being a big selling point for us."
"It does great deduplication. From a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk"
"I like how it separates the iSCSI drives from the standard shares. It has two different routes to it. I know most of the other solutions do this, but I just like the way that Dell EMC does it."
"The way it takes the Snaps, that is one of the best features. Snapshot performance is what is key in the Unity, compared to a traditional VNX."
"Ease of use is probably number one, compared to the previous storage that we've had. Easy scalability, easy set up. Compared to everything else, the Unity is, well, you could call it child's play. As long as you know what you're doing storage-wise, Unity is really easy to use."
"Compared to our old platform, everything is more tightly integrated. I don't have to go to different sections to do something. A lot of it is wizard-driven, so it's an easy to use system."
"Our architecture has historically relied on RDMs, so AFF has enabled us to easily migrate from our old EMC PowerMax to the new NetApp. It's been pretty smooth. We have a lot of SAP servers in our environment, so performance is critical for us."
"The most valuable feature is speed."
"I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten."
"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."
"The overall latency in our environment is very low because it's All Flash and we've got 10 Giga dedicated to the storage network"
"NetApp's All-Flash storage solution has delivered the most value for our company. All-Flash is an excellent technology that delivers high performance for our workloads. We are happy with that."
"The ease of use, the SnapMirror capabilities, the cloning, and the efficiencies are all good features."
"The stability is solid. It doesn't fail on us, which is exactly what we want. We are in a critical business that we can't have any percentage of downtime."
 

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."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"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."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"The software layer has to improve."
"Thick provisioning of LUNs."
"Dell EMC Unity's competitor, NetApp, has a similar product. However, it has a clustering technology where you can group multiple systems together, then you can move data from one system to another seamlessly. I would like the Unity to do that."
"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."
"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)."
"Improve the administrative user interface so it is easier to work with. Currently, a simple task, such as removing a host from 100 LUNS, takes a lot of time. If they could improve LUN to host model to be more like the EMC VPLEX, for example, it would be great."
"Because we can do synchronous replication between the two sites, this made the setup challenging for this piece. They did not know how to set this up initially. We ended up having to do bidirectional synchronous replication."
"Currently, the protocol SNMP is not implemented. That's a problem, as we follow this protocol and I can't check the integrity of this equipment."
"The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing."
"The stability is good but there is room for improvement with other options."
"I do not like the NetApp GUI. For example, the GUI of ONTAP Command Manager could be better, but the CLI is perfect."
"We installed NetSender to test it. I think it could be a good solution. It is very small now, but will probably become bigger in the next few months to years."
"It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products."
"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."
"I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated."
"I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation."
"I know they're working well with Microsoft and VMware. However, they could integrate with more."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"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."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"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."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"In the SQL Server instances in our data warehouse, we immediately saw a great return on investment."
"We looked at HPE Nimble but the price of the Unity XT was very good compared to the competition."
"There is an annual charge for the license of this product. It has better pricing than its competitor: Pure Storage."
"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."
"The solution is very expensive."
"The license is not required, but we must renew the support every year, every two years."
"Licensing is a little bit confusing. Going through everything with them, there are a lot of line items to go over. Every single thing is broken down into a line item, and it starts to get really confusing in terms of what we're actually purchasing when it comes to the product."
"It is shipped with all licensed, included for this product range, no need to buy additional licenses"
"It is pretty expensive compared to other solutions. I would give it a seven or eight out of 10 in price (where 10 is expensive) compared to similar solutions."
"From an application standpoint, we have seen a lot of return investment on the speeds and responsiveness of the actual storage."
"It depends on how you look at things, but they are in a higher price range."
"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."
"Using NetApp, our total cost of ownership decreased by 17%."
"We benefited from implementing all-flash by reducing our data center footprint. We took it from 30 racks to just over five. This is one of the biggest savings for us."
"It's expensive but we think over time all the prices are going to go down."
"One of the reasons we like this solution is that all of the features are included with the one license."
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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
65%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Government
3%
Educational Organization
67%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
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.
851,491 professionals have used our research since 2012.