Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

It helps our customers save money because it's at a price point where a lot of our customers can easily bring it in for different projects and it will also provide for DR. I find that the cost has really enabled them to do a little bit more with it.

It performs great. Customers really like it. I've had a lot of customers go from the previous platforms up to Unity. They've noticed better performance with it.

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.

Ease of management is one thing I get a lot of good feedback regarding as well.

The flexibility is also important. We still have a lot of customers that have a use case for non-flash, yet you can also build the flash version as well.

I would love to see more compatibility between the different platforms within Dell EMC's portfolio.

Stability is great. It has been very rock solid.

Now that they can do the controller upgrades, it's really helped them out a lot, and it'll help to be able to scale more. They're not just trapped into one model and, instead of having to do a lift and shift of all the data, they can now do head upgrades.

The support is still going through its growing pains right now, with the merger of the two organizations.

I rate it an eight out of 10. It's very frustrating that it's not backward-compatible with the previous platforms, so it's a struggle for a lot of our customers. We can overcome it, but it's a hard conversation to have with them sometimes.

Go in open-minded. If you're used to the old VNX platforms you'll be pleasantly surprised.

As a reseller, I cross many industries. I deal with a lot of state and local government, a lot of health care, and a lot of commercial and banking industries. This product fits that mold across all those spectrums, as do other EMC products, but Unity is primarily the one I go to market with.

Some of their recently added feature sets, like the dedupe and compression, they have been a pretty significant improvement. 

First, it's the "Unity," it's the name itself. It's unified, it does block and file, so that is pretty important to my customers who might have file servers around their environment. I can roll them all up into a single array, as well as provide block storage for them on one array. 

It's the simplicity part of it. It's the ease of management, it's the call home, the CloudIQ functionality. It's all built in. I think Dell EMC has put a lot of thought into it. That's what I push out to my customers, to bring that message to them.

They added the dynamic pools, that was the biggest improvement. They have incorporated replication, RecoverPoint for BCDR, they have a good disaster recovery, they have a good replication strategy. I think they've got their spots covered.

It is scalable, but you have to know your customer, and what the environment is. Perhaps you're going in there with a Unity 350 and then, at some point, do a data-in-place upgrade to a 450 or a 550. You have to get a good base understanding of what to initially go with for customers, so they're not coming back to you six months later saying "Hey, this thing is full."

This is an interesting question; how to gingerly talk about it? I think in the past, I've always been able to call - I have the phone number memorized, I've called it hundreds of times. I know there has been a lot of work on it. Dell EMC is starting to transition back and put more thought into their support.

I would give it an okay rating. I think there is headway that needs to be made as compared to competitors out there, to be honest with you.

It started down the Clariion route, and then we went to VNX obviously, when that transitioned over, and then we transitioned again to the Unity and we're on that side now.

As a service provider, on the VNX side, on the Clariion side before, we make our money in services. There could be a couple of days of services to install a VNX or Clariion, as we would go through all the processes to do so. On the Unity side, it is almost "next, next, next." If you can read a big Ikea instruction manual, you can install this Unity box. I give it to them, hands down, they have done a fantastic job with that.

From the services side, I'm a little hesitant about how easy it is, so I'm glad I have other things like RecoverPoint and the like, tertiary services I can continue to install.

Other competitors in the industry, they had a "me too" box, but I don't know if as much thought went into them as went into the VNX and the Unity.

I would give it a high nine out of 10. The only thing that makes me pull back is the continuing work on the support. To be a 10, that is asking a lot, in my opinion. But I think Unity is right up there. I think they're ahead of their game with any competitor out there. Compared to the top three or four that you could consider in this realm, I think Dell EMC has them beat, hands down.

The most valuable feature that Unity had at that moment was the ability to communicate with the previous family, the Clariion. So, the migration and all the data transfer was really easy.

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 have been dealing with Dell EMC Unity XT for something like 20 years.

The oldest implementation I have done for Unity was about six, seven years ago and it's been working pretty good. No problem so far.

I have had no problem at all. I think this is one of the most important things. It is very good. Maintaining it and deploying updates require very low maintenance. We haven't had problems. We had to replace a couple of disks in all these years, but it was pretty straightforward.

We switched to Unity because of the price, but that was for the migration from IBM to Dell Clariion. And when replacing the Clariion to the Unity, it was an easy migration of the data.

The initial setup was simple. The main problem is that you need an extra appliance outside of the disk - you need extra hardware.

My advice would be the same thing as the Data Domain - it is important that there is good sizing at the beginning. It makes a difference.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Dell EMC Unity XT a 10.

We use Dell EMC Unity XT as a storage solution for a virtual machine datastore.

Dell EMC Unity XThas helped our organization with the high availability. It has been working very well and the performance has been good with an old flash solution that we are using. It has improved the reliability and speed of virtual machines.

The high availability of Dell EMC Unity XT has been the most important feature.

The interface and configuration could improve.

I have been using Dell EMC Unity XT for approximately six years.

The solution is stable.

The solution does not fully scale because it's a scale-up solution, not a scale-out, but if you get the right target, you will be able to scale up to meet your needs. We are not planning to expand the storage of the solution at this time.

We have approximately 200 users using this solution.

The first level support from Dell I was not happy with because as a technician I needed to get the second or third level support. However, the level one support was able to pass me over to the right technician and I received the solution pretty fast. The support overall was very good.

We previously were using the Dell EMC VNX storage and before it, we used CX storage. It's is basically the same solution evolving during the time.

The implementation is straightforward, the configuration tool two hours, and to deploy it took approximately three days. We did some configuration changes and considerations which took a lot of time to test.

The interface and how the configuration needs to be completed could be simplified.

I did the implementation of this solution. The solution works well and does not need any maintenance or assistance unless it is broken.

My advice to others is for them to make a good plan and to use that resource they have.

I rate Dell EMC Unity XT an eight out of ten.

This was for our SAN storage. Pretty much everything runs on this: databases, servers, etc.

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.

The software is very easy to use.

• Space
• Ease of use
• Snapshots
• Replication between sites
• It is very seamless.

We would like to see the synchronous replication process included in the next release. Not having this downgraded our performance by 65 percent. This really needs to be improved.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

The technical support is really good. I can open up a chat support session with them, then they can either resolve it or turn it into a ticket.

We previously had the VNX5700, which was seven years old. It was at end-of-life, and we had maxed out its capacity.

The initial setup was straightforward for the most part. Because we can do synchronous replication between the two sites, this made the setup challenging for this piece. They did not know how to set this up initially. We ended up having to do bidirectional synchronous replication. 

We used Data Blue (previously LPS), as our integrator, to do the installation for our deployment. They worked with our onsite Dell EMC representatives.

Our costs are roughly $200,000 a year.

We narrowed it down to Hitachi and Dell EMC. We put it out to bid and Dell EMC won.

Overall, it is good product.

If you are doing asynchronous replication, this is a great solution. If you are looking for a synchronous replication solution, I would recommend PowerMax.

We have it set up for storage for VDI. It is as advertised: Very easy to set up, very easy to manage, and the performance is great. We have integrated the solution with Horizon VDI and there was no additional cost to do so.

I don't have to spend nearly as much time getting in to manage the device on a daily basis because it functions very smoothly. We don't have any issues with it. Usually, on a daily basis, we don't mess with it. It's been hands-off since got it set up and configured. It's been great.

The ease of setup and management have been the best features.

The only thing that could improve it would be a price reduction.

It's very stable. We hardly get into the device itself to manage it on a daily basis. It's been great.

We have not had to scale it yet but, from what I have read and understand, scalability will be very easy. Adding extra bricks or nodes to it is going to be easy.

We haven't had to use technical support.

We had a previous storage device that was coming to end-of-life and we wanted to replace it. We had to do it in a very short time, last year. I liked the performance and the features that the Unity had. The cost was also a factor in our choice.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that they need to be an industry leader, they need to be easy to work with, and they need to be fast. A lot of times in IT, we move fast. I need quotes fast, I need demos fast. That's one of the things that Dell EMC has always done for us. Those are a few things that we look for.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We had a Dell EMC technician on site to help us. He was very helpful, explained what he was doing, let us get hands-on when we wanted to be and could. It was a very smooth process.

Our shortlist also included Nimble. 

So far, it has done everything that they say, in demos, it will do. I cannot stress enough how simple and easy it is to set up and use and manage. That's it.

Regarding simplicity of ownership, everything that we've experienced so far has been very easy to deal with. We already have a Dell EMC rep who handles all of our licensing and notifications, keeping us up to date on that. Management of it and service have been very positive, nice and simple.

It was also very easy to order. We have had a relationship with our Dell EMC reps in Kansas City for the last 12 years, so getting in touch with them, having them come out and demo the product as best they could, and then getting us the pricing, getting it delivered - everything was very simple.

I rate the Unity at eight out of ten. I don't think it's possible for it to be ten. They'd have to have someone from Dell EMC show up and do my job for me to get it to a ten.

We had a stand-alone storage system and we wanted to purchase a Metro Cluster system. We looked at other companies and we found EMC was the best of them. That's why we choose them.

At the moment it's a cluster, we use it in different data centers. In case of any interruption, a power cut or something, our data will be continuously available.

At the moment we are using it with VPLEX. VPLEX is a very big advantage for us. We don't use very many of the Unity's functions. But it does provide good provisioning, allowing us to save space. We use all-flash systems and they are quite fast.

The monitoring part could be better. With EMC storage systems - or Unity and VPLEX, because I'm using them, for the moment - the monitoring part is very difficult. They should improve this to have a better reporting system.

The stability is quite okay. We have not had any downtime with the Unity. We have only been using it for three months. We have just finished the migrations, but so far it is working quite well.

For us, it's scalable.

Setup was very easy.

When selecting a vendor, as a technical guy, it's the power or bandwidth, the technical details, that are more important to me.

I would definitely tell a colleague to go for Unity.

Storage for high I/O databases.

Most of our systems had their respective performance bound to how fast the DBs were responding. After migration to Unity 300F, we were able to put more DBs on flash, reducing latency. The results were visible in the front-end systems, and all users noticed the improvement. The change impacted not only end-user satisfaction but also productivity, as users were able to perform more in the same amount of time.

• Performance
• Low Latency
• Integration with VMware

These features are important for us for two reasons. The first two features - performance and low latency - are customer-facing and have direct impact on the user experience. This way, our work is more visible and we are able to improve not only user perception but business processes overall as well. VMware integration makes the life of our engineers easier, as we are almost 100% virtualized and this feature is used on a daily basis.

I have three suggestions: 

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.

Additionally 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. 

Last (and I understand that it has a low chance of being implemented) the copy services currently are redirect on write. It would be great if the administrator could choose between redirect on write and copy on write, when configuring copy job.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Good.

We were using EMC VNX, and it was a natural upgrade from tiered to all-flash storage.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Migration was smooth and configuration of the storage was quick and simple. The time needed to put it into production was less than expected, and data migration itself went without a glitch.

We always do a business case, so I recommend that to others too. If the business case sums well, go forward.

We evaluated options from other vendors and, although there were some other very good propositions, we chose DELL/EMC as we have the knowledge and we trust the partner.

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.