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DDN IntelliFlash 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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
218
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
DDN IntelliFlash
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
25th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (11th)
Dell Unity XT
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
198
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray is 7.5%, up from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DDN IntelliFlash is 1.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 6.0%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Everpure FlashArray7.5%
Dell Unity XT6.0%
DDN IntelliFlash1.3%
Other85.2%
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
reviewer2393595 - PeerSpot reviewer
L3 Storage Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Good customer service and support and suitable for large environments
It is very easy to install. Users don't need to remember anything while deploying IntelliFlash because everything will be taken care of by tech support. They can easily modify the installation or change the password with the help of the tech support. It is very easy to integrate IntelliFlash with other solutions. We have plugins that can be integrated with other solutions. It will require maintenance. It is the same as any other storage solution: updates and upgrades, firmware upgrades, and drive upgrades.
NR
TSG Manager at Navigator Systems
Ease of implementation and robust performance enhance multi-OEM support experience
We are limited only to hardware replacement, not administration tasks. We work on AMC products through Annual Maintenance Contracts. We provide support up to the 680 model. The XT680F is a newer model, and we support from 380F to 680F. The FlashSystem 8000 series is all-flash, and there is also a 5000 series flash model. We can compare IBM DS series, including the 8000 series for recommendations. For NetApp, we can recommend the FAS 8000 series.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For VMware, it has been a humongous savings."
"Compared to Unity, these arrays offer significant advantages, such as NVMe technology and higher IOPS."
"It has good stability for our company."
"Performance, deduplication, compression, and fast response time for requests from servers and applications."
"It's very fast, easy to use, and the cloud-based management is good."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit we saw, from our very first benchmarks, was that our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other changes."
"Cuts VM deployment down to seconds and cuts latency under MS with amazing performance and very stable operation with no worries about how much it can handle."
"After five years, the cost decreases over 30% and the performance increases over 50%."
"Once we got this solution in there, we were able to get the reporting down from eight hours to under 20 minutes."
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"With so much technological advancement and more coming, the world is their oyster."
"Ease of Use: Someone can learn it in only few hours Performance: Easy Tier is doing miracles Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"We have been able to realize storage space savings for our virtualization environment and it has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the number of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"On a scale from one to 10, I'd probably give EMC customer support an 11. It's been really good. We do have premium support, which means if we have a problem, it gets solved really quickly."
"The technical support is very professional and provides quick responses."
"Unity provides a complete storage solution for VMware on a Wintel Windows box for various applications, such as SQL or Patron Databases."
"The solution helps us be more competitive in the market against our competitors."
"The Unity XT box is very strong, it doesn't break, the MTBF time is very large so you don't have to worry about faults or outages in your operations, and it is a very complete platform."
"We've never had an issue with storage."
"We saved money by moving off old storage and we gained extra capacity and speed."
"As far as cost is concerned, it does great deduplication, and from a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk."
 

Cons

"We have not had a good experience with the IBM device."
"Pure Storage can improve FlashArray by providing more logging visibility to customers. Currently, there is no log visibility."
"I would like to see box-to-box encryption on replication included in the next release."
"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."
"In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database, the whole array went down, so our customers were down for around eight hours."
"Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex."
"I would say it's somewhat scalable, maybe not so much as some of the competition, but we don't really care."
"In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation."
"In future releases, I look forward to more AI features."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically."
"It's annoying that if you turn on SMB3 (as opposed to the earlier CIFS protocol), then it is not possible to access a file store using a mixture of SMB and NFS."
"The monitoring matrix and its dashboard need work."
"The solution should allow for connection and replication with other storage models such as HPE, IBM, and Hitachi."
"There is a lot of room for improvement on the support side, because of the response time."
"VNX used to have some features that Unity still doesn't have, so the progress is not that advanced compared to what customers might expect."
"Dell EMC Unity XT should present a path or a roadmap on how they could put their products on the cloud. This would have some value for their current customers."
"In the management interface, you can only create one LUN at a time."
"The NAS capabilities of Unity - I have to say there are a lot of things I miss. For example, deduplication for hybrid."
"We've got massive issues at the moment with IBM AIX. It's not stable. We have a lot of disk errors, production crashes sometimes."
"It could be improved in the area of management flexibility. For example, I really need to set read-only access for LUNs, and there's no such option with Unity XT."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The best features come included without any additional cost."
"It's priced higher than the market."
"The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"While it comes with a higher price tag, this investment often translates to significant improvements in performance."
"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"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."
"We lost a lot of customers because we couldn't compete on price with other vendors."
"I recommend the full bundle software in order to have all the functionality. It is more expensive to purchase it one by one."
"I think we pay around 100 grand per year for three arrays or four arrays."
"When you look at what Dell EMC is compared to, like NetApp, they're all priced pretty similarly. I think the pricing of the hybrid model is good."
"It is shipped with all licensed, included for this product range, no need to buy additional licenses"
"We looked at HPE Nimble but the price of the Unity XT was very good compared to the competition."
"Most licenses for the solution are free but upgrades are available when adding additional software or storage."
"While it has a good price to start, they could always make it cheaper."
"For costing, you have to have a budget in mind because SANs can be fairly expensive and EMC offers a wide range of products."
"This solution offers great pricing."
"Our CAPEX was close to $42,000 and operating costs are below $1000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business66
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise152
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business62
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise96
 

Questions from the Community

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Our customers using Dell storage also use competing solutions. Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also ha...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IntelliFlash?
It is a bit cheaper than other products, 10% to 20% cheaper.
What needs improvement with IntelliFlash?
DDN IntelliFlash should improve in terms of sales. In future releases, I look forward to more features about AI and M...
What is your primary use case for IntelliFlash?
We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways. They have large scalability and use more th...
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 Storage FlashArray
Tegile, IntelliFlash N-Series, IntelliFlash T-Series, IntelliFlash HD-Series
EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Bank of Stockton, Barnsley College, Boyes Turner, Brigham Young University
Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre
Find out what your peers are saying about DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell Unity XT and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,915 professionals have used our research since 2012.