DDN IntelliFlash vs Dell Unity XT comparison

DataDirect Networks and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. DataDirect Networks is ranked #26 with an average rating of 9.0, while Dell Technologies is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.6. DataDirect Networks holds a 0.9% mindshare in AFS, compared to Dell Technologies’s 5.7% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of DataDirect Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

DDN IntelliFlash and Dell Unity XT are competitive products in the storage solutions market. Dell Unity XT seems to have a superior feature set, making it worth the price for users despite pricing and support being favored for DDN IntelliFlash.

Features: DDN IntelliFlash offers high performance, advanced data management, and flexible configurations. Dell Unity XT provides comprehensive data protection, seamless cloud integration, and robust performance. Users find Dell Unity XT’s feature set more extensive, while DDN IntelliFlash offers notable efficiency.

Room for Improvement: DDN IntelliFlash users suggest enhancing integration capabilities and scalability options. Dell Unity XT users recommend better documentation and improvements in reporting tools. Both products have specific technical aspects needing enhancement to better meet user expectations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: DDN IntelliFlash deployment is praised for simplicity and responsive customer service. Dell Unity XT deployment is straightforward but receives mixed reviews regarding customer service efficiency and support responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: DDN IntelliFlash is seen as cost-effective with a quicker ROI, appealing to budget-conscious buyers. Dell Unity XT, while more expensive, offers strong long-term value and return on investment due to its advanced features. Pricing varies, but users find Dell Unity XT's higher cost justified by its capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell Unity XT Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell Unity XT

February 2026

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 1.5%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DDN IntelliFlash is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 5.7%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Dell Unity XT	5.7%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe	1.5%
DDN IntelliFlash	0.9%
Other	91.9%

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh

Chief Technology Officer at Lambda256

Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.

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Anil Rahulwar

Storage Engineer at Movate

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.

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Deepak Kannan

Sales Account Manager - BFSI Sector at Frontier Business systems

Customer needs are addressed effectively with collaborative sales and service support

Recently, customers have been asking for a cloud tiering option in storages. Some Dell storages do not have cloud tiering, which is an optional commercial feature. NetApp's FSA model 2750 comes with an inbuilt cloud tiering option. In the future, if Dell storages include this option, especially for Unity, it would help us target SME or medium enterprises for quicker closures and support the sales team.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

"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."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"The latency is good."

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"

"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."

"We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways."

"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."

"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."

"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."

More DDN IntelliFlash pros

"The most valuable feature is that the solution is a hybrid system, so you can do both block and file storage."

"Performance is a top feature."

"I have had no problem at all. I think this is one of the most important things. It is very good. Maintaining it and deploying updates require very low maintenance. We haven't had problems. We had to replace a couple of disks in all these years, but it was pretty straightforward."

"We can get almost real-time response times."

"The benefits are the simplicity, flexibility and the ease of integration between the Unity platform and VMware, for example, and Microsoft platforms; the integration tools and the simplicity of management."

"We were able to integrate it very quickly with other solutions."

"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is its support of protocols for both block, and file levels. It has the features a store solution should have."

"Integration; We use the product with VMware, and also use it with Syft for home directory and departmental shares."

More Dell Unity XT pros

Cons

"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."

"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."

"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."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."

"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."

"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors."

"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."

"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."

"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."

"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."

"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."

More DDN IntelliFlash cons

"On the data domains - for the Unity product, but specifically for data domain - I would like a much easier interface for managing, for actually going in and having one place where I could get all of the different parts of the overall unit. And I would also like to be able to identify individual disks a lot more easily."

"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."

"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."

"It isn't easy to find trusted partners for the product. The solution has issues with mid-level storage and does not come with enterprise storage."

"Its replication technology could be better."

"It would be great if the solution could integrate an NVMe disk."

"There are some features in VNX that I wish were in the Unity. For example, Storage Groups for isolating LANs and hosts. That is a big issue."

"If there's anything Dell EMC could do to get the same performance for a cheaper price, that would be great."

More Dell Unity XT cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Its biggest valuable feature is its price point for the amount of storage and performance you get. It's a sweet spot. It's cheaper than the other SANs out there, but performs well enough. It fits that nice, middle-ground portfolio."

"When I see other products—like HP, Huawei, and Lenovo—from competitors, I have seen a lot of disadvantages with EMC, price-wise. Huawei and Lenovo are very price competitive. Looking at the price point for a country like Sri Lanka, where we have a very low economy, I think you need to look at a pricing mechanism that is a bit more flexible."

"It's an expensive solution, particularly for medium companies. One device costs about 30,000 euros. The support contract is quite expensive as well. We are currently looking for other lower-cost solutions."

"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."

"Licensing is fine. We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity."

"The price of Dell EMC Unity XT is not reasonable. They should lower it because the trend is to move to the cloud. They have to protect their market by giving commercial or financial incentives."

"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."

"There is not a license required for the use of the solution. We purchased a maintenance contract."

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	62
Midsize Enterprise	49
Large Enterprise	94

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.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...

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What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IntelliFlash?

It is a bit cheaper than other products, 10% to 20% cheaper.

See all answers

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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

Dell PowerMax vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

TrueNAS X-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

VAST Data vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 24% of the time

NetApp AFF vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 9% of the time

Tintri VMstore T7000 vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 7% of the time

DDN SFA7990X vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 4% of the time

More DDN IntelliFlash Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 33% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 12% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 9% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell Unity XT Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

January 2026

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

DDN IntelliFlash

February 2026

Download DDN IntelliFlash product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT

February 2026

Download Dell Unity XT product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Tegile, IntelliFlash N-Series, IntelliFlash T-Series, IntelliFlash HD-Series

EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

Western Digital through its IntelliFlash arrays delivers high-performance storage with a complete range of features and connectivity options, including inline compression and deduplication, application and VM consistent snapshots, replication, RAID, data encryption, VMware vCenter integration, and multi-protocol support for SAN (FC, iSCSI) and NAS (NFS, SMBv3). IntelliFlash arrays deliver high availability through dualredundant and hot-swappable components, active/active or active/passive controllers, non-disruptive software upgrades, eMLC flash, and proactive cloud-based monitoring, analytics, and intelligence. A RESTful API provides scripted or programmatic control.

DataDirect Networks

Dell EMC Unity XT is one of the best all-flash storage arrays on the market today. Dell EMC Unity XT arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built for a multi-cloud world. In addition, they support digital transformation, enabling businesses to reach the full potential of their data capital quickly and easily. Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms provide the performance, efficiency, enterprise-class software, and virtualization integrations required for running a wide range of virtualized applications.

Dell EMC Unity XT Features

Dell EMC Unity XT has many valuable key features, including:

Unified storage flexibility: With Dell EMC Unity XT you can consolidate separate storage platforms into a single Unity XT unified storage system via a simple and intuitive (HTML5) management GUI that also connects you to CloudIQ.
All-inclusive data protection: Dell EMC Unity XT offers a reliable way to protect application data with all-inclusive data protection services, including snapshots, data-at-rest drive encryption, replication, thin clones, and dynamic pools.
Software-defined solutions: Dell EMC Unity XT provides software-defined storage and HA for on-prem and in the cloud solutions.
Multi-cloud alignment: With Dell EMC Unity XT you have the ability to build and manage an effective data-first multi-cloud strategy. It allows you to consolidate public and private cloud resources that align with your business goals.
Metro node: This feature enables automated business continuity with zero RPO and RTO. It also provides greater flexibility through multi-platform support and replication to any array and has zero performance impact on the storage array.
Scalable file system: Dell EMC Unity XT is built with a robust 256TBu file system. The UFS64 file system includes up to 256 independent VMDK clones, 16 thin clones, space efficient snapshots with a simple space reclaim and low IO impact, file system shrink that can reclaim free blocks, simplified Quotas for User, and much more.
DevOps integrations: Dell EMC Unity XT supports the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin to run Kubernetes workloads.

Dell EMC Unity XT Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC Unity XT include:

High-speed data access
Low latency
Dual-active controller architecture
Multi-cloud
Intuitive user interface
Cost efficient
Solid performance

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC Unity XT users.

A Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company says, "It is definitely one of the most robust, solid, well-performing products that I have dealt with. It is set it and forget it, which is pretty amazing." He also mentions, “We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device.”

Peter S., Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company, states, “The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs. This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.”

PeerSpot user Melvin T., Senior Systems Engineer at Prosperity Bank, explains that the solution is “easy to use and we can add LUNs or space without interruption to end-users. We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity."

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Bank of Stockton, Barnsley College, Boyes Turner, Brigham Young University

Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre

Buyer's Guide

DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell Unity XT

February 2026

Free Report: DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell Unity XT

Find out what your peers are saying about DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell Unity XT and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.

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