Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We used Dell EMC Unity XT for onsite storage.

We were moving from our HP3 power data center to a hybrid cloud solution. We still needed some onsite storage, but we wanted faster performance and a more efficient capacity. The flash storage generally outclasses older solutions, which was why we went down the flash storage route.

Having gone down the flash storage route, we liked Dell EMC Unity XT because of its speed and efficiency. We did compare it with Pure, but we liked Dell because Pure is more niche, while Dell EMC Unity XT is more general purpose. We can also buy other things from Dell, and we get better prices from them, compared to Pure. In Pure, you can only buy storage. These are the things we liked about this product.

Dell operates at the commodity end of the market, so if they really want to get into storage in a big way, they need to have better pre-sales technical support and engagement.

They do what they say, but if it was a really big implementation, I would be worried about recommending Dell EMC Unity XT, simply because we need to have a more technical understanding of it. The technical engagement can be a lot better.

Dell EMC Unity XT is a stable product.

Dell EMC Unity XT has good scalability.

The technical support for this product is fine.

There is an annual charge for the license of this product. It has better pricing than its competitor: Pure Storage.

We evaluated Pure Storage.

I'm in IT and my niche is digital transformation consulting. One of my customers needed a storage solution, so I recommended Dell EMC Unity XT. I'm not a storage consultant. I'm a digital transformation consultant, and one of my clients needed a storage solution.

I'm not a user of this product. My clients might need a solution from time to time, and what I do is I recommend solutions.

Dell EMC Unity XT is a good product.

I didn't get involved in the initial setup of this product, but I believe it was straightforward. It only took one to two days for the installation, then we were able to migrate our data.

I can recommend this product to others looking into implementing it.

I'm giving Dell EMC Unity XT a score of seven out of ten.

We use it to high-speed all of our SQL Servers.

It increased the boot speed on our SQL Servers. It made downtimes incredibly small compared to when we had them on normal spinning disk. Back then, it would take two or three minutes to boot up. Now, on all-flash, it's 25 to 30 seconds. So it has improved downtime, if we have to reboot a server, which is something we do a lot.

We used to have Exchange on it but we've put that in the cloud so it's no longer on a solution. When we did have it, it was faster because it wasn't on spinning disks. It helped us with that.

Being all-flash makes everything super-fast.

It's also great to manage. That's the easiest part. We also have another SAN, from Pure, and the Unity is easier to manage than the Pure.

Support and licensing are big things, in the end, that needs improvement.

It's very stable. We have not had any issues with it since we put it in. We've had one drive fail in two years. It was easily replaced, a hot swap and done. It has been incredibly easy and been stable for two years.

We have used technical support and I would rate them a massive zero. I put in a ticket, although my preferred contact method is a call. I never receive a call. I send it to my sales engineer, my sales engineer sends it to their manager, the manager tells the guy to give me a call, and he sends me an email. That's not my preferred contact method and, even when complaining, I still get an email.

Also, when I put in a ticket and say, "Here are our logs," they don't read the logs. It even says to do so in the ticket, but they skim over it. Their support has been pretty bad since they became Dell EMC. EMC used to be good. Dell has been horrible forever. I think it's going down that road.

We were using the VNX and the IBM V7000. We needed to move to a new solution because they were slow. There was a little bit of flash in the VNX, and some in the V7000, but the all-flash was just such an improvement that we decided we needed to go to the Unity.

When looking to work with a vendor, the important criteria we look for are nothing too pushy, and having a good relationship, and a continued relationship. It's not good when they just sell and leave. It's always good to continue that communication, make sure we have everything we need.

The fact that it reduces our downtime gives us incredible cost savings. Our industry is agriculture. We do market trading. Seconds are everything that matters. That minute, or the few minutes, that we save can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars. If that happens in the middle of the day, since we are trading constantly, reducing the amount of time that it takes, when something goes down, to get back up is cost savings.

Licensing is a little bit confusing. Going through everything with them, there are a lot of line items to go over. Every single thing is broken down into a line item, and it starts to get really confusing in terms of what we're actually purchasing when it comes to the product.

We looked at Pure. Unity beat out Pure.

Make sure you have all your ducks in a row when you finish. Make sure they understand the type of support that you want, make sure the licensing is clear, make sure it has all the features you want.

The purchasing process was actually incredibly easy. We had a vendor to go through. She was able to clear everything up. When we were trying to look at it ourselves, it was a little bit convoluted. But once we had her help explain it through, it became easier.

They have a good product. It's great for what it does. The surrounding pieces are where everything gets tricky.

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.

We're using it to host development workloads and it's performing as expected.

Dell EMC Unity XT is cheap and deep storage. It fits the business need that we had. I'm sure there are a number of other products out on the market that compete just as well.

One of the most valuable features is its cost. It was inexpensive compared to other arrays that we were looking at.

It's also easy to manage. I have 20 years of managing EMC storage and it has been the same from day one, pretty much.

We have also integrated it with vSphere and SQL. There were no costs involved outside of our normal workload licensing, no costs that were specific to the Unity platform.

It does what we bought it for. I don't know that there's anything else that it needs to do that we're not leveraging from it already. From a product perspective, I don't see any room for improvement.

From a service perspective, they can do nothing but go uphill.

One to three years.

It runs. It operates. Developers can do their development work. It's not screaming-fast, but it doesn't fall down when you bring up a workload. So it's performing as expected.

We did encounter a firmware bug which actually caused loss of data. There was some heartburn around that. But in general, it has operated as expected, except for that bug. Fortunately, we found the bug in pre-production, so we didn't lose anything that we needed. However, had it been in production, we'd be having a very different conversation about Unity.

I can't really comment on scalability. We bought the frame fully loaded. I don't know whether it scales or not. I suppose if I bought a unit that had half the capacity, it would scale to the max capacity. That wasn't my need.

Technical support has gotten progressively worse. In the past 24 months, give or take, the amount of attention from Dell EMC support for flagship products, both the Unity platform - which replaced VNX - and their VMAX platform: Their support teams and R&D have gone down under the Dell regime.

Our customer service, our support, the engineers that we get on the phone, the hassles that we put up with at level-one and level-two, didn't exist three or four years ago with EMC. We paid a premium for EMC products and you got a premium service as part of that investment. We don't get that anymore.

Set up went flawlessly.

Generally, with these types of products, there is not really much documentation from the build and configure perspective. There's a config sheet that you work on with your SE team. But it's not like going out and getting a packaged product from a Best Buy and implementing. There is an expectation from the config sheet for fiber connections, network connections, speeds and feeds, and the like. That is enterprise-class architecture. That's out-of-the-box. 

Dell EMC came in and did the implementation. They were knowledgeable.

I didn't put together an ROI for this product. We had a fixed budget that we wanted to invest in storage for development teams. This fit the bill.

Pricing was competitive compared to other products on the market. Among the ones we considered, Unity came in with the best price.

Compared to other EMC platforms, Unity is nice because it is all-inclusive, in terms of the licensing model. That's unique for them, compared to other manufacturers. It is beneficial. We could use replication, native, right out-of-the-box.

We looked at NetApp, Infinidat, Pure. 

My advice is: Stay up to date on code.

Regarding the purchasing process, we went through a VAR and it was easy. Once pricing was established, the bill of materials was defined, we paid for the product, and it showed up.

In terms of important criteria when selecting a vendor, from an executive perspective, it's partnership. From my team's perspective, it's probably 

• usability
• performance
• stability.

I want it up, I want it to stay up, and I don't want to have to manage it.

I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. It's not an all-flash array so it's not the fastest thing on the market. But the stability has been good, minus the initial bug. It does what we ask of it.

We had old systems - CX4-960 and Celerra - and we wanted to consolidate the systems to the Unity platform for the customer because the old systems were very expensive for maintenance.

The only reason we made this move was to save costs, to be honest.

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.

In the next release, I would like to see stable performance on AIX. AIX are mostly mission-critical systems, so the support has to be there.

We have had a lot of issues. We've got massive issues at the moment with IBM AIX. It's not stable. We have a lot of disk errors, production crashes sometimes, and that's not good for a retailer.

Also, we still have to administer the Celerra because we have massive issues with the filer system of Unity. We hope it gets better with the 4.2 or 4.3 release. We do not have the integration for connection to Centara. This means we have to keep the data on Celerra and cannot migrate to Unity.

Scalability is not good. We have a Unity 300, now we have to do a data-in-place conversion for the next upgrade because only 150 slots are supported, not drives, only slots. So my job next week is to do an in-place upgrade from 300 to 400.

The setup was complex but it was one of the first Unity systems in Germany. We sold it in August two years ago.

If you plan to use Unity as a filer system take a bigger controller because with the 300 and 400 you have performance issues compared with other filer systems. For pure filer systems, I would recommend an Isilon or NetApp, or something like that. Unity is a unified solution, if you have to do unified, but it's better to separate if you have more data.

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.

We prioritize performance-driven systems. The Dell Unity XT delivers excellent performance and offers support services.

I always look at performance and quality. When we deploy solutions that work well, we directly help our customers improve their business operations. The only thing that might change my mind about the Unity XT is a product with comparable quality and performance at a lower cost.

I like its performance and support. 

There is room for improvement in manufacturing. 

I have been working with this solution for three years. My support contract is for five years.

It works fine for me. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

It is highly scalable. There are around 200 end users. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

The customer service and support are good. 

Positive

The initial setup is not complex. I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy. 

It took a day to deploy the solution. This Dell Unity XT system is deployed directly for a primary customer of my company. So, our company works directly with Dell.

The deployment was done with the help of the integrator. One person was enough. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

I provide support for these storage products.

I like that the performance is very good.

It would be better if there were more integrations.

We have been using Dell Unity XT for two and a half years. 

Dell Unity XT is a stable solution.

Dell Unity XT is a scalable solution. 

Technical support is very good. The response from technical support was very good.

Depending on the hardware, it takes about three to four hours to deploy this solution. 

We sometimes use third-party help because we are facing many hardware issues.

We have to apply for a license for each system. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Dell Unity XT a nine.