Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We primarily use Dell EMC Unity XT for SAN storage for ESX data stores. It has been performing okay. We have integrated it with VMware. We do have iSCSI LUNs for some Microsoft Windows servers as well, but not many.

It allows junior engineers to administer it a lot, so senior engineers, like myself, don't have to do hands-on stuff. It's less complex.

The most valuable feature is the interface. It is really usable, easy to manage.

Looking at that ease of management, for LUN creation, I like the integration into VirtualCenter. I used to have to add LUNs manually, then scan them in and format them. It does that all for you, all in one, immediate deployment of LUNs. Also, for replication, we use RecoverPoint. It's a little clunky but, overall, the Unity part of that product works in a very simplistic manner. It's easy to manage.

I would like better integration with RecoverPoint. My major issue with the solution, all around, has been RecoverPoint more than Unity. While I like the easy user interface, I would like some more advanced features for troubleshooting built into the product, so that we can do more in-depth problem-solving.

The issue we're having right now is that we can't really see much in the interface. Support can see more, but we can't see what's going on, so we have to rely on support to send us things. I would like something that a power user, an advanced user, a subject matter expert, could actually look at and say, "Okay, this is what's going on here," to make troubleshooting easier, instead of just the happy, bubbly alerts.

One to three years.

Stability is the problem. We've had stability issues with it. We've had problems with the iSCSI interface. We've had it for two years now and for two years we've had problems where a service processor will drop, we'll lose connectivity to LUNs, we'll lose connectivity to the storage, issues like that. No matter how we've tried to chase it down, everybody just points fingers at each other. The only thing that changed in our environment was that the Unity solution was installed. It's the "least common factor."

The scalability is great. If we need to expand, it's very easy to expand.

Aside from the finger-pointing, they're generally pretty easy to work with. But in my opinion, it's hard to get up to higher levels of support. For a complex problem like we've had, it's been very difficult for us to get ahold of the right type of people. We almost need engineers or someone at a higher level. When you call in, you get the base-level people. What I always say whenever it comes to tech support is, if I'm calling you, it's not a problem that's easily solved. Because if it was easy, I would have fixed it myself. So getting to those higher levels of support has been very problematic for us. They just want to say, "It's not our issue," instead of someone actually tackling the problem.

We had a VNX before and the one that we were using was starting to be phased out. We needed to keep on support and we need to stay with a solution, for our clients, that is newer and cutting edge. We were aimed towards Unity.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is interoperability. It has to be able to integrate really well.

Deployment was complicated when we did it initially and we still have problems with it. We had a VAR come out to do the initial install.

As far as cost is concerned, it does great deduplication. From a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk. It's easy to manage, which saves us time. Overall, that time is money; it saves us money. It has a pretty good ROI.

As far as simplicity of ownership goes, I don't think there is anything aside from the maintenance licensing.

We were aiming more towards Dell EMC because that's what we had previously.

Test it really well first, and get somebody who knows what they're doing to set it up. The VAR that we were referred to was terrible. That was the root of a lot of our problems.

If we didn't have the problems that we had with it - all the problems that I highlighted above - it would be definitely a ten out of ten. But given those problems, and the fact that one of them has been going on for two years and we still don't have a solution, and the Unity is the only factor that changed in the environment...

We're using it for block storage in a lab, supporting Fortune 500 customers, testing out solutions. We have a number of other competitive solutions in the lab and we try out upgrades for customers, we test out all the different features and functions.

Performance of the system is fine, I really don't have any issues with the actual raw IO of the system, but the competitors are pushing a lot of all-flash solutions in front of us.

We're not doing any integrated Snapshotting of the applications. Some of our team is working on being able to Snapshot Oracle RAC clusters but, for the most part, we're focusing on doing mostly backup solutions, data protection software.

It is completely reliable. The plugins for it are quite mature. I don't really have any issues with the interactions with vSphere, they all work as intended. There is a level of reliance and a maturity in the product, whereas the other ones are a little more cutting edge and the bugs can come out of the blue.

It still has the same implementation headaches of the VNX that came before it. It's still the same Unisphere, it's all the same tools from the VNX, nothing has really changed, from my perspective. It's still all the same stuff we're used to seeing. The management of it just isn't very strong, whereas a lot of the tasks I do day-to-day on some of the newer competitors, like Pure and Kaminario - we're talking three to five seconds to get something done rather than 15-20 minutes. It's a big time saver on the other systems. With the Unity, once it's installed, raw performance works fine.

In future releases, I would like to see automatic upgrades from one to the next, when this system is coming out and the next one is coming in; more akin to what Pure Storage is doing. That would be really helpful.

I don't know that I can really address the issue of scalability with the units we have. We have mostly a test box, a small one. We haven't had to add disk shelves or do any scaling of the system.

Unity is a lot like "no one gets fired for buying IBM." I think you will get what you pay for, but a lot of competitors have better efficiencies, better programs, easier installations. I'd be looking elsewhere. I don't feel the product is the leader in the market anymore.

I rate the Unity at eight out of ten. It gets the job done, it does it well, I can rely on it. It's just not cutting-edge in any way right now. To get to a ten, as I said, the upgrade process needs improvement. I should be able to swap it out, with zero downtime, with another array, down the road. I don't think Dell EMC has anything in the roadmap for this product line. I just don't want to have to deal with that anymore, and all of our customers feel pretty much the same.

The biggest improvement is the data reduction for the organization. That is where they see the better TCO and improved ROI for their existing footprint. That's the biggest advantage for the businesses that are using the Unity platform.

The features that customers are looking for, because I do a lot of architecture work, is the management simplicity. The provisioning is very simple in the Unity platform, as well as the reporting structure back to the customer. They get to know end-to-end visibility in the system environment.

Inline dedup compression security is coming up as an issue, encryption is key for our customers. If we could have more ways to do software-based encryption, those are the features customers are asking us for, as well as replication.

The maturity level of the Unity is getting better and better as we speak. The latest and greatest cores are becoming more stable than the previous one. EMC is doing a lot of investment in research and development. They're getting better and better.

It is scalable. Customers are going more into distributed architecture, so the Unity definitely  has a scalable architecture built into that. Scale-out architecture, scale-up architecture.

There is a lot of room for improvement on the support side, because of the response time. I'm giving the customer feedback. Customers are coming to me as their architect, as a level-1, level-2, they're asking me. The response from the EMC is not there yet. We are sending the same feedback back to EMC, to improve the support line.

We started with the VNX platform. I have a very good understanding of the EMC portfolio from Centera, from NS, VNX, VNXE, and then VMAX.

Setup is very easy. Absolutely. It's easy to build the environment. That has improved a lot.

At the end of the day, the licensing cost is key, because every customer has a pain point, that the cost of each piece is high. So if we can bundle everything in a package, that is how the competitors are selling their footprint. For example, Pure, if you buy a box, everything comes with the box. So, in a similar fashion, if we can do anything along those lines, it will be better for the customer.

I give it an eight out of 10, because there is definitely room for improvement, for EMC to invest in it.

I think that EMC has a good name in the market. VNX was a great product, and Unity is seen as the natural replacement. Customers see that as an advantage of the Unity. 

VNX used to have some features that Unity still doesn't have. From that perspective, the progress is not that advanced, at least compared to what customers might expect.

We hear from our customers that it is stable. The other thing that customers say is that it's easy to manage. But, as I previously said, I think it has some things that are not ready yet and they are being announced for the next releases, such as inline compression and deduplication, IP replication, synchronous replication. VNX used to have these but Unity, not yet so. But we have good feedback about the product.

For our market, in Argentina, Unity is, most of the time, a good product, a big product. It is unlikely our customers would be short of on the number of drives or IOPS with the Unity. We don't have huge enterprises compared to the American market, for example. Unity is enough for our market's scalability. With the biggest products in the Unity line, we cover pretty much every customer and, if not, we start talking about VNX; but only for a couple of the biggest companies in Argentina. We are a small market.

Sometimes our customers are switching from an installed base of a competitors' solution, for example, IBM, or HPE. Some are users of VNX and are migrating to Unity.

EMC is the leader in the storage market so our customers see that, of course. Maybe they trust more in Unity than, for example, Compellent, because it is a product that comes from EMC. At least in Argentina, it is seen that way. Maybe Compellent products are good, but Dell's storage name is not the best.

I don't do setups myself. But I've heard that it's standard, it's not that complex. In a couple of weeks, the program is fully configured.

I would rate it a seven out of 10, mostly because of what I mentioned already, the features that aren't ready yet that previous products had. I think it is seen as not that mature. That's why it could be better. Maybe they should have stayed with the VNX until Unity was ready to be the natural replacement, and seen as the next step. I don't think that they can show big improvements in the Unity compared to what the VNX was.

• FAST Cache: The ability for hot blocks to almost instantaneously be served from Flash.
• FAST VP: Enables us to better utilise the Flash resources that we have.
• ESRS/CloudIQ: Having the array communicating back to Dell EMC enables me to get faster responses to issues which may arise, like a failed disk.

The Unity 400 Hybrid has enable us to better utilise our storage resources and make adjustments dynamically without having to shut down our hosts.

• Inline deduplication would be nice.
• Better management of the hosts in Unisphere.

15 months.

Yes, we had an issue in January with a Service Processor rebooting unexpectedly. Dell EMC resolved this quickly with a special build of the OE and a permanent fix was included in the next public release.

No, the Unity 400 hybrid is highly scalable. It adds extra storage or connectivity can be done while it is online.

10 out of 10. One of the most important criteria in our purchasing decisions is the technical support. DELL EMC set the benchmark for us by which all other vendors are compared.

They have always met their stated service levels and have never let us down. They always follow up to make sure everything is OK.

Yes, we had a CX4-480, which had reached the end of its service life.

The setup was extremely straightforward, As long as you follow the initial config guide, your first LUNs can be available in a couple of hours.

Dell EMC is very competitive on its storage pricing, and from our experience, is not only the superior solution, but the best priced.

Yes, we also looked at IBM and NetApp.

The Unity 400 is one of the easiest to manage and the most reliable storage systems that I have managed in my 22 years in IT. Performance-wise it has met or exceeded all our expectations. If you do run into a problem, the support is second to none.

The storage solution has all our data from all systems, including our new ERP; the whole organization depends on the storage to work. All data is in one location.

Real Unified Storage (Block, File, VVols) in a unique 2U hardware. 

LUN mask. The Host LUN ID is sequential by access in the hosts. When one LUN needs access by many hosts (for cluster purposes), in some cases the Host LUN ID remains different on each host. Storage groups or global IDs for LUNs could be a good solution for this.

No stablility issues.

No scalability issues.

Very good.

The initial setup was very simple.

The licensing process is very simple and it has many features. I can't talk about pricing because I'm in a technical position and I do not have access to costs.

Yes, we still have a VNX5400 (block), before it was at a production storage site, today it is at a disaster recovery site. The change from VNX to Unity was because of the build of the DR site, a new ERP implementation, and to update the storage technology.

Other storage solutions need additional hardware to support file storage and the integration sometimes fails; or they offer fewer features.

We were EMC partners for some time, now Dell EMC partners. Our choices are based in Dell EMC products because we understand that the EMC technology is better when it comes to storage solutions. Among the EMC storage options, the Unity is the best choice when we analyze price, scalability, performance and  features.

The Dell EMC Unity is a small but powerful storage solution. With the "unified" concept it is possible get many features for less.

By having ease of management in central management, this means that our company no longer needs to hire a dedicated storage engineer. The administration of it can be passed over to existing team members without us spending on additional resources.

On the capacity side, by having compression available from the All-Flash storage, we are in a position where we are no longer running out of space, so if we are, we are notified well in advance, and the ease of expansion means that it can be done remotely without an engineer configuring it on site. So, the disk can just be inserted, and we can support it all remotely.

Cost-effectiveness means we are actually able to provide the sums in pairs to have disaster recovery (DR) as opposed to buying one single larger solution. We can have multiples.

• Expandability for capacity management is pretty important.
• It has compression, which allows you to store more data than you would normally under the arrays.
• The ease of use in central management by Unisphere Central.
• Cost-effectiveness, when compared to other products.

The uses of tools to communicate with EMC directly. With EMC, I am not able to connect and resolve issues without assistance, so they can't do unattended maintenance on devices, which would be a massive benefit if they could.

They need a resource available to like grant them access or privileges onto the devices, so it can delay upgrades and fixes being put in places because we might not have a resource available who can assist them at that time.

If they could manage it remotely as they were, completely remotely without off-switching it, that would be a massive asset.

It is very stable. We have never had an issue with it.

The scalability is exceeding expectations.

I would give them an eight out of 10. They are knowledgeable and solve my issues in a timely manner.

We used an older EMC product, and we switched over because this was a newer model that they had released. We moved from a VNXe to the Unity devices.

It was straightforward. It was very easy to set up. Every single step of the process was well documented, intuitive, and easy to follow. There were no caveats or any extra things we had to do to get it to work. It worked out-of-the-box.

From a functionality perspective on cost-effectiveness, it is exceeding all expectations.

For costing, you have to have a budget in mind because SANs can be fairly expensive and EMC offers a wide range of products. It is important that you know your requirements exactly before you go ahead and purchase one of those devices. Because it could be either under or over your requirements.

We checked out Nimble Storage and HPE MSL.

We evaluated based on performance, scalability, availability, security options, and costs. The Unity was either equal to or better than the other products in all those areas, plus the staff already had previous familiarity with using EMC products, which is why we kept using it.

For someone researching whether to implement Unity: If they have familiarity using EMC devices previously, then it is really a no-brainer. You would use this because you will be able to install, setup, and configure it without any additional training required for your current staff. If you're a new customer, and you have another product, the Unity offers several features that other products do not. I would advise just looking at the technical specifications or ask EMC to give you a preview because they are very helpful over the phone, and they can do a live demo for you.

It has increased the reliability in our organization and it is cost effective.

• Replication and reporting
• Replication of the communication object (COB) scenarios

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

There were no stability issues.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

Previously, we were using the EMC VNX solution and I am still using it.

The setup was straightforward. It is just simple clicks. You just need to follow the manuals and the instructions.

This product is cheaper than the EMC VNX solution. It is good for small businesses.

We evaluated other solutions, namely Nutanix and NetApp.

• EMC is known for its reliability
• This product is good
• It is easy to install and maintain
• It operates with low maintenance and manpower costs