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 5.9% mindshare in AFS, compared to NetApp’s 0.4% 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 March 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 1.6%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell Unity XT is 5.9%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolidFire is 0.4%, 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	5.9%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe	1.6%
SolidFire	0.4%
Other	92.1%

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

"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."

"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."

"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."

"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."

"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 latency is good."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"It is scalable. Customers are going more into distributed architecture, so the Unity definitely has a scalable architecture built into that."

"Dell excels in service and support."

"The solution is so easy to manage that I forget it is there."

"It's easy for us to use because we use other solutions which are built for Unity, like VMware, which are recovery points. They work with the Dell EMC Unity system, as these products integrate well in our environment."

"The compression and deduplication that will be coming in version 4.3. With just those features, you're reducing the amount of data and the footprint on the hardware."

"The hardware itself, it differs from Compellent and differs from the VNX before it. It doesn't have a separate file harbor that goes with it, there are no separate NAS heads. It's 2U, you have file and block storage, so you get a quite a lot of services for a small footprint."

"We have resolved IT challenges with this solution. It sped up our environment. We went from spinning disk to all-flash, which reduced our footprint."

"It will certainly help us scale bigger. If I look at the footprint, the VNX's was multi-rack. Now, all of a sudden, we're only at a portion of a rack. And, obviously, if we can scale within the same rack - we can certainly see that by the number of hard drives we've had to put in - we can scale a lot more easily."

More Dell Unity XT pros

"The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system."

"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."

"It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast."

"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."

"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."

"The simplicity of it."

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

"The scalability and being able to implement it quickly."

More SolidFire pros

Cons

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

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

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"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 software layer has to improve."

"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."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the deduplication part, because for large deduplications, you need an extra appliance to do it in order to avoid having problems in performance. I think that could be improved, because everything should be included in the product, not with an appliance from the outside."

"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."

"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."

"I would like to see more integration with other products."

"We would like to see more advanced integration capability added to this solution."

"They can certainly improve in terms of monitoring."

"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."

"The EMC VNX Virtual Data Mover (VDM) software needs more improvement."

More Dell Unity XT cons

"SolidFire could improve in terms of hardware robustness."

"They could make the mNode more user-friendly. Now you need to configure and add nodes by CLI and it’s not really easy to manage. If they created a web interface to do the management of the mNode, that would be great!."

"You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future."

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

"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."

"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."

"For example, the ease of use with the reporting. Right now it's not impossible, but you have to know Sequel. It's a little time consuming to get those customized reports in there."

"I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud."

More SolidFire cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

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

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

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"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."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Here is our major complaint with pricing. Dell EMC comes to us and gives us a price. We are like, "Well, this doesn't even compare to what we got on the last project." We say, "No, you should bring it down to this level." Then, they come back again and we are sort of in the middle again. I am like, You already sold us other stuff at a better price. We are not going to just say, 'Yes,' because we are out of time.""

"It scales, but then you have to buy additional stuff."

"The pricing was quite okay compared to others. We probably got it cheaper because we were the first ones out of the gate, but I would say that it's good value for the money."

"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."

"Looking at it based on cost per gigabyte, it's certainly very effective."

"The license is not required, but we must renew the support every year, every two years."

"The solution is very expensive."

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

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

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

"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"

"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."

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

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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

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

22%

Marketing Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing 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.

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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 ...

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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 8% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 4% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe 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

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 4% of the time

More Dell Unity XT Competitors

Pure Storage FlashArray vs SolidFire

Compared 52% of the time

NetApp AFF vs SolidFire

Compared 48% 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

February 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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