Dell Unity XT vs SolidFire comparison

Dell Technologies and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.6, while NetApp is ranked #33. Dell Technologies holds a 5.7% mindshare in AFS, compared to NetApp’s 0.3% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

SolidFire and Dell Unity XT are leading storage solutions. Users favor Dell Unity XT for its advanced features, but SolidFire stands out due to competitive pricing and support.

Features:SolidFire is known for efficiency, scalability, and seamless integration. It also offers robust performance. Dell Unity XT highlights include versatility, data compression, and remote replication capabilities. It offers a more comprehensive feature set than SolidFire.

Room for Improvement:SolidFire could improve its data recovery tools and simplify administrative tasks. Dell Unity XT might benefit from UI enhancements and reduced complexity. Both products have specific areas for improvement based on user suggestions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:SolidFire is favored for quick deployment and strong customer support. Dell Unity XT has a longer deployment process but offers responsive support and extensive documentation. Each offers strong support in their own way.

Pricing and ROI:SolidFire is praised for cost-effectiveness and quick ROI owing to lower setup costs. Dell Unity XT is more expensive but offers extensive features that justify the cost in the long term. SolidFire is seen as budget-friendly, while Dell Unity XT is a worthwhile investment for advanced needs.

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

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT vs. SolidFire

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 Dell Unity XT is 5.7%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolidFire is 0.3%, up from 0.2% 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%
SolidFire	0.3%
Other	92.5%

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.

Read full review

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

Ramil Cerrada

Solution lead at Globe Mobile

A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance

The most significant benefit lies in its exceptional performance, driven by its Flash-based architecture. This enhances routing speed and, consequently, database performance. The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential.

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

"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."

"I appreciate the performance."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."

"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

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

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"It's easy to handle for administrators and it's a unified system. It's not as complex as Celerra systems or CX4 Clariions to administrate. You can do everything with one GUI."

"All-flash is a game changer. If you need performance, simple operations, and you plan to use it with VMware, it is a good choice."

"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."

"It is ease to use. It performs. It's easy to provision, and It's stable."

"It has made deployment, configuration, and maintenance a lot simpler."

"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."

"Performance is a top feature."

"Integration is easy with this product."

More Dell Unity XT pros

"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."

"The simplicity of it."

"The quality of service for minimum iOS, to maximum iOS in a multi-terminal environment is very powerful. The SQL service feature is the best part of SolidFire."

"Being able to provide quality of service as promised."

"Templates are already predefined for it. If you're coding it up, it will take two days. You can pick up a template right there from the API, and it just works for you. Implementation done in 10 minutes."

"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."

"We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that."

"SolidFire is one of the products that does have great APIs right out-of-the-box. It works great. The tools and the other stuff seem to work a little better right out-of-the-box than the ONTAP stuff does, C-Mode."

More SolidFire pros

Cons

"The software layer has to improve."

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

"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."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"I would like the device to have the ability to pull down its own firmware. That would be a great thing."

"The only challenge I've ever had was with a Drive firmware upgrade."

"We had one incident with a memory leak that led to controller reboot. Although it had no impact, when such things happens the storage should be more aware of it, send alerts, and propose corrective actions."

"I would like them to continue to build on the solution and expand on the functionality, like replication."

"I'd like to see more of the NVMe back-end for the flash. And the big deal with the PowerMax is that they've used all U2 drives so that they can avoid having to take it down. I see using M.2 and modular sections as being a real nice alternative that could be implemented in Unity at a fairly low cost."

"The reporting should be better. In other systems, you can create many different kinds of reports but this is not the case with Dell."

"I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage."

"The VNX reporting is much more granular, versus the Unity reporting."

More Dell Unity XT cons

"SolidFire should start from two nodes instead of the four nodes. That's the only thing. In a lot of solutions, we have to use four nodes, that's the better thing. But as a starting point, two is better. That's why their starting point is expensive."

"When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming."

"It's a very good Windows-type solution. But we do a lot of legacy systems and the like. So it's getting that incorporated into it that would help us."

"One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued."

"Though it is a stable solution, its users may face some security issues at times...The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved."

"The scalability of HCI or SolidFire as such isn't a concern, but when you compare it to PowerMax or NetApp AFF series devices, scalability is a concern because it's only the drives that are connected to the nodes. We don't have any shelf connectivity."

"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."

"We are looking for, potentially, on the Active IQ reporting side, to do reporting based on the datastore. Right now, I can report on the whole SolidFire, or I can report on just a certain datastore or a volume. I'd like to take all of my VDI infrastructure, which as an example would be multiple datastores."

More SolidFire cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The price is very reasonable."

"What they really like is the easy licensing now - Dell EMC has caught up to a lot of their competitors - based on not having to charge for everything, and they can get everything in one bundle."

"The price of the solution should be less expensive. However, at some point, you need to pay for facility and performance."

"We purchased a five-year warranty."

"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."

"While Dell EMC is costly, I don't have any complaints about their licensing model."

"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."

"The price in our country is very expensive and some of our customers opt for lower-cost alternatives."

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

"We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision"

"It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get."

"On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution."

"Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side."

"The price of this solution is more expensive than others."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

26%

Marketing Services Firm

14%

Outsourcing Company

Computer Software Company

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	62
Midsize Enterprise	49
Large Enterprise	94

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	16

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.

See all answers

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 ...

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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 14% 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

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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

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell Unity XT Competitors

NetApp AFF vs SolidFire

Compared 50% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs SolidFire

Compared 50% of the time

More SolidFire Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

February 2026

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT

February 2026

Download Dell Unity XT product report

Buyer's Guide

SolidFire

January 2026

Download SolidFire product report

Also Known As

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

EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity

No data available

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

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

SolidFire delivers all five core elements needed to deliver newfound storage agility to your next generation data center and beyond. With SolidFire you can deploy new applications and capabilities faster, provide more agile and scalable infrastructure, increase application performance and predictability, enable automation and end-user self-service and raise operational efficiency and reduce cost.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre

California Public Utilities Commission, RFA, 1&1, Ultimate Software , Endicia, ezVerify, MercadoLibre, Sungard Availability Services, ServInt, Elastx, Hosted Network, Colt, Crucial, iWeb, Datapipe, Databarracks

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT vs. SolidFire

February 2026

Free Report: Dell Unity XT vs. SolidFire

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

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