No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

DDN IntelliFlash vs Dell Unity XT comparison

Sponsored
 

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
224
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

"Pure Storage is seen as a visionary company with leading edge technology."
"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"Non-disruptive upgrades: You can upgrade at anytime without worry."
"All my customers are pretty happy with most Pure Storage solutions."
"The Pure Storage customer service is by far the best part of the product and organization."
"It has a small footprint, as the current system is only four units per rack, it's got good speed for the price as it uses eMLC, an advanced type of SSD, and it's very scalable, and we're not paying for capacity as we get free controllers every three years."
"Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors, as we've looked at some of the other competitors on the market."
"The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring."
"We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways."
"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."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks Cheaper than pure solid state without needing to actively manage where the data is located."
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"After five years, the cost decreases over 30% and the performance increases over 50%."
"With so much technological advancement and more coming, the world is their oyster."
"It has cut batch job runtime in half, so we're seeing performance improvement throughout the organization."
"It has saved us time when provisioning new storage, so we're trying to automate that process."
"Stable data storage platform which promotes ease of management through its multi-cloud support. Remote support provided to users to address issues is very good."
"Dell Unity XT is user-friendly and easy to use."
"This solution helped us reduce our physical footprint and power consumption."
"The difference was astronomical."
"The most valuable features include snapshots, Thin Clones, and deduplication and compression."
"Tech support is good."
"Compared to older generations of arrays there is quite an improvement, compared to the older VNXs, for example. It depends on you use it, but for our purposes, we find Unity simple to use."
 

Cons

"There could be better storage."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services."
"The higher education moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of existing features."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client."
"The monitoring matrix and its dashboard need work."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"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."
"In future releases, I look forward to more AI features."
"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically."
"Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"Issues with slow responses from the support team."
"I would like to see more compression and deduplication added to the solution. Today, our compression is about 2:1 and other solutions give us about 4:1 or 5:1."
"I would give it a high nine out of 10. The only thing that makes me pull back is the continuing work on the support."
"The only room for improvement I can see would be a faster lead time and lower cost."
"We went to the PowerMax because of the needs that we have for the business. We're doing true enterprise-level storage."
"The only thing that could improve it would be a price reduction."
"You can't use every feature, because it costs in performance. Therefore, you have to choose which features to use to achieve a better environment. That is why customers do not use every feature in Unity."
"Having used EMC products for more than 15 years, this is the first product in that time that I could find nothing to like."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price-to-performance is good. I looked at Pure about three to four years back, but the price-to-performance wasn't right for us. Now, it's right."
"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
"The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive."
"It is cost-effective because after buying a subscription, they provide a service to upgrade hardware for free. They are providing so many features. When you consider the features provided, it is cost-effective."
"It is a cheaper solution."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"There are no licensing fees or other costs."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"I think we pay around 100 grand per year for three arrays or four arrays."
"I recommend the full bundle software in order to have all the functionality. It is more expensive to purchase it one by one."
"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."
"I liked the price point when we purchased it."
"Pricing for this product is manageable, though slightly higher than comparable products."
"Go with the virtual appliance versus the hardware."
"We integrated it with VMware vSphere at no additional cost. As we moved into VMware vSphere, this is what we bought to go with it for our storage performance."
"Currently, we buy directly from Dell EMC. We've tried going through resellers before, but we've found that if we go directly through Dell EMC, we get a good a price from being with the government."
"From a pricing perspective, this solution is comparable to others on the market."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which All-Flash Storage solutions are best for your needs.
896,034 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction 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 Business69
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise156
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 needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I do not have any improvements at the moment; I like how it is. I have nothing to add about needed improvements.
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.
896,034 professionals have used our research since 2012.