Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We propose this solution when customers need to expand their workload or storage.

It is great because it can work as a SAN and net storage.

It is expensive, and the pricing could be better.

We have been using this solution for three years, and most companies in Egypt partner with Dell EMC. It is the main storage solution that we sell to customers. It is deployed on-premises.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the scalability a nine out of ten, and we have more than 80 customers in Egypt.

There is a good ROI if the customer has critical applications and file storage.

The licensing is included in the appliance, and I rate the licensing costs an eight out of ten.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten and recommend it to others.

One advantage was the ability to use different types of disks and different types of disk solutions to increase the speed, first of all, and to take advantage of different storage costs across the life cycle of the data.

• One of the most useful features for us was the deduplication. It had been challenging for us to store certain types of data and to use patterns of storage to reduce storage size.
• The IOPS and the speed were also an important part of the solution.
• In addition, there was a Unity machine that offers block-level and NAS, and we used the block-level storage.
• We also use the side-to-side storage verification for the recovery site.
  
• Finally, the device was flexible and we could change the configuration to meet our needs.

Our request to Dell EMC for improvement was in the reporting and monitoring areas. Dell EMC built up a cloud ID so that we could see the overall storage numbers. We needed to have the proper KPIs to be able to see and manage things.

I worked with Dell EMC Unity XT for two to three months. My last role was IT director so I didn't do a lot of hands-on with the devices. I was overseeing the IT staff and doing project management for these kinds of solutions. At that time I was working for a manufacturing company for pharmaceutical life cycle products, and we were a customer of Dell EMC.

There was no problem with the stability. It was, as expected, very strong.

You can grow as much as you like. There is no limit. It's easy to scale.

We had about 1,000 users of the Unity XT.

We did not need to contact their technical support.

The initial setup for Unity XT was pretty straightforward. We knew exactly what we needed and our requirements were very easily applied to the box. With one day of hands-on training, my colleagues were able to manage things.

Maintenance required one person.

We used an integrator for the deployment. They had great knowledge of the product. We also did some additional integration with them in other parts of the storage, including backup and data domain devices, because we were very fond of the work they did.

The main factors to consider are space, availability, business continuity, performance, and IOPS. The Unity XT box is very strong. It doesn't break. The MTBF time is very large so you don't have to worry about faults or outages in your operations.

It is a very complete platform. Dell EMC wrote a new OS for storage, but I haven't seen it yet.

We looked at HPE Nimble but the price of the Unity XT was very good compared to the competition.

It's our primary storage. It is just for VMWare with a lot of Fail Over clusters.

For our mission critical applications, we run SQL, Oracle, Fail Over server clusters, VMWare, and databases. We use it for our primary VMWare environments, with a VPLEX, just for failover and performance. We use it for Windows Plus! because you need shared storage. In addition, we use it for healthcare systems.

We only use it for block storage. We don't use any other features. We have a VPLEX for applications.

Unity is supporting the organization, but it's not improving it. It's just hosting the applications.

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

I would like better monitoring capabilities: more historical data with more insight into the performance for the database. We now use a separate tool for it. Therefore, it would be nice if we could have that straight from the tool.

The stability is good. We are very happy with the Unity.

It does what it says it does. It performs, so you never have performance problems with it.

It scales, but then you have to buy additional stuff. So, if we need it, we can scale it. That is not the issue. However, we don't need it to scale further, because when I scaled it down, there are multiple platforms that we will move off the Unity to a hyper-converged or Isilon solution. Scalability isn't that important.

The technical support is good.

It's quite straightforward. It's deciding some IP addresses and building a storage pool, then you're off.

We always buy it with implementation services. However, we did the implementation ourselves.

With the large Unity that we bought, it has saved us about one and a half rack space. That's our return on investment on our flash array. We also need less Fibre Channel connectivity.

We had VPLEX, and it's a good merge with Unity. So, we didn't look very much further.

We also looked at HPE and Hitachi. We went with Dell EMC since we are a Dell EMC house.

It does what it needs to do that is the reason why we bought it.

We are not interested in the cloud option.

For most of our general-purpose cluster, we are using a Unity as Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage. Earlier, we were using a VNX box. Compared to VNX we are getting better performance.

We are looking for a lot of automation from the Unity. For example, if I want to create one LUN from the Unity box, I have to do multiple clicks. I create zoning and there are a lot of steps involved. But, looking forward, we can reduce the steps, automate things so they are done more easily, deploying LUNs.

The deployment is very easy. Via a click, we can deploy a data store or LUN to the ESX host. We can also deploy VVOLs to the ESX server.

I'm looking for more automation, not only for VVOLs, but for NFS and RDM disk.

The stability is good. I don't see any issues with the Unity boxes.

Scaling is easy. If there is future growth I am able to call Dell EMC to provide additional capacity.

When it arrived at our data center I was there, but the installation and configuration services were done by EMC. I sat with them, watched what they were doing. It was pretty simple.

I would definitely recommend Unity because, compared to VNX and other storage solutions, it is the easiest way to deploy for VMware and physical operating system services.

Regarding ownership, it is very easy. It's a single point of contact. We have the type of support from Dell EMC where, in case of any failure, we get an immediate response from them. For the purchasing process, we just validate the bill of materials and then we reach out to the Dell EMC salesperson to get it delivered to our data center.

We are working on the vSphere integration. Once that integration is done we will easily be able to do everything on the vSphere console.

The primary use case is mid-tier processing for our hospitals. We have a lot of VM infrastructure on the Unity, but not our most mission-critical. The performance has been great.

The biggest benefit is where it fits in the cost profile. It's for VMs that, again, aren't mission-critical but do need some performance. It fits really well there for that. We get exactly what we want from it, what we expected.

The replication is big for us.

We use file services on Unity and it has a really nice file services interface.

It's also easy to manage. It's really easy in terms of provisioning, replication. There are no real tricks to it. It's just easy.

The biggest one for us, and the reason we don't use it more, is that we can't throttle the replication speed. If it's on, it's on. So we have to be a little more WAN-sensitive, in some applications, which means we can't put it everywhere. That's the biggest issue for us, by far.

The stability has been very good. We've had it for a couple years, really like it.

Scalability is also really easy. There are lots of options.

Our experience with technical support depends. That mid-range is probably not the strong suit in terms of Dell EMC support. They don't have the depth of technical experience in that area like they do with some of the other products. But we haven't had any serious issues with it.

This was a VNX replacement. We had an older VNX that was off the depreciation tables and maintenance costs were a little higher, as the equipment aged. We just replaced it, pretty much one-for-one.

When selecting a vendor, a big factor for us is the quality of support.

The initial setup was really straightforward. I've been doing this for a long time so there were no real surprises in terms of the Unity.

The ROI is right where we need it to be. It's a reasonably priced array. It performs a function that we absolutely need, and it definitely fits where we want it to be. We wouldn't use it for everything but, where we use it appropriately, it makes a lot of sense.

This one came down to either Dell EMC or Pure. We had a NetApp as well, but we weren't considering that. Pure doesn't really have the depth of product offering, so this was an easy choice for us.

I would definitely recommend it and have recommended it. We're pretty large, but I think for most companies it probably is the array that's going to work the best, especially for a VM workload. If you don't want to invest in a VMAX, this makes a lot of sense.

It fits that price profile really well. It's an entry-level, all-flash array for us. So stuff that we don't want to go on VMAX or XtremIO, we can put right on the Unity and feel pretty comfortable that it's going to do what we need it to do, as far as performance goes. Unity falls right in, with it being the successor to the VNX line. It works great, has a very simple interface that we're comfortable with, so it's a good product for us.

In terms of the purchasing process, we have a pretty good sized environment, so we work with our dedicated team. They knew that this was going to perform the way we wanted. We had a spot where we needed some VNX replacement and this was the logical choice. It was very easy.

My rating of eight out of ten would get to a ten if it had throttled replication.

We're using Dell EMC Unity as our primary storage for our production and for our DR site. We've had no performance issues with it, whatsoever.

We're using it for our data storage, for our virtual machines. It's the only array that we have, so we're not doing tiering at all. Everything is on the unit. We're using it for the data storage that we replicate to our DR site, for the ones that just stay local. We're using it for allocating raw disk-mapping, for mapping storage from the SAN directly to virtual machines for super-clusters and the like. We're using it for everything

The fact that it's all-flash has really helped our overall performance.

It's easy to manage. We access it and manage it through Unisphere and have had no issues. We're able to provision storage, create consistency groups, create RDMs for our virtual machines. Creating it through Unisphere, it automatically adds the data store on the VMware side and rescans the LUNs. We just have to add and configure the storage in one place and it takes care of everything, which is very handy.

Unity only does compression. It would be nice if there was a deduplication feature as well. At my previous job, we used XtremIO and that had deduplication and not compression, and I think we got more out of it because the more OSs you have that are the same, the fewer copies it needs to keep of all that data. So, the deduplication would be a nice feature to have.

We've had almost no stability issues.

We had an issue once and it turned out to be a bug. There was a memory leak and we had an issue in our DR site where one controller would reboot and then come back up and then, later on, the other controller would reboot and come back up. Then it happened once on our production site where both controllers went down at the same time. We worked with Dell Support and they found a memory leak and they recommended we upgrade to the latest code version.

They have a script you run, a utility to gather the logs, etc., and then they analyze. The hardest problem was that, because they're analyzing logs, they have a certain SLA in which to do that. Even though we had a production issue and we wanted it resolved right away, it took them a few days to analyze the logs and get back to us.

We've added more and more on to it, and had no issues with it. When we started there, they had just deployed Unity. It was used in a few places, but not all that much. We've been migrating more and more over to it to get off of and retire the VNX, and we've had no issues. The compression has been working well.

We came from a VNX platform and we had lots of performance issues on the VNX, especially when we were doing OS patching. When all the reboots happened at the same time, we had performance hits on the VNX, systems crashed, and so on. And with the Unity, we have no issues. It's much easier to manage than the VNX. I've been managing both, but I've found the Unity is a bit easier to manage and to deploy.

From what I understand, the VNX was coming off of support and our company worked directly with our Dell EMC rep to see what was out there, what we could use, which storage arrays have which features, and they went with Unity.

To go with all-flash with Dell EMC, you've got XtremIO and you've got Unity. Unity is the type of array that you can size yourself and say, "This is how much storage I want," and you can add on in the future. With XtremIO, you're buying a set package and you get what you get.

Each solution is dependent on the use case so it's really hard to give advice without knowing the exact use case the person is trying to fill. But we're very happy with Unity.

I rate it at nine out of ten. If they added dedupe, that would get me to a ten.

It is for users of VDI solutions.

• We use it to implement all our VDI solutions.
• It is easy to deploy and manage.
• We were able to integrate it very quickly with other solutions.

• Cheaper
• Its consumption of kVA

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.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is good.

Ordering is easy, but the processing site and working with those companies was difficult.

Our primary use case is branch office. It has performed adequately well.

Performance is the key factor within the branch offices and this platform, because it is a small form factor, definitely helps address our power-space constraint problems, within this facility. It also provides overall performance improvement of our business applications which are critical to our regional offices.

• Quick Snapshots
• Cloning, which we need in our environment
• It's all-flash array, Unity 450F
• It has performed adequately well for our business needs

There is nothing needed at this time.

It's very stable. The current firmware version we're on is the latest and greatest, so we've been pretty happy with the overall performance and availability of the platform.

Again, it's a branch office, small, so there's no need to scale it, we haven't crossed that path yet. This is our first implementation of Unity within our environment, we are primarily a VMAX shop, so our venture into the mid-range arrays was something that was brought on because we needed better performance within our regional offices.

Based upon my experience working with previous EMC platforms, the GUI is a vast improvement over the previous GUI's, the elimination of Java, the use of HTML5 was a substantial improvement, and the ease of use of the GUI made it very, very intuitive for my team and myself.

Here, we were using local Dell servers with local, attached storage, and we needed something that could provide a high level of availability for our customers in the branch, and that also fit into a small cabinet within our closet. The solution presented itself as a viable platform for what we needed in our space. The whole goal - high-availability, capacity, performance - all three were met by the Unity 450F storage platform.

It was straightforward to a point. There were some minor hiccups with the registration piece. It's something I shared with my account team, but overall, once we got past those hurdles, everything else was a simple install, configure. 

When selecting a vendor, support is the key thing.

Do your research. There are a lot of vendors out there but if you're looking for performance, price-point, ease of use, I recommend looking at Unity as a platform. It's a great platform, for mid-range businesses.