Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We primarily use it for backup.

It is a good backup product.

• It is easy to manage. A lot of the system manages itself.
• It is nice the way ESRS works with remote support, being able to remote in and take a look at problems proactively.

• I would like to see more integration with other products.
• The interface can be a little challenging for someone new.

It is pretty reliable.

You can just add nodes and shelves to it.

The remote support is excellent.

We had a case automatically opened last night, and it is being handled.

Dell EMC has been around for a long time. Owning VMware is a big plus.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Support long-term
• Longevity
• Cost is always an issue.

We use our Dell EMC Unities to store the bank's data. We have one Unity in our production environment and another Unity at our disaster recovery site.

We use it in conjunction with VMware. We store all our virtual machines on Unity. 

The Dell EMC unity interface is simple to manage. We manage it by ourselves. We create logs to store data. It's also 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. 

All our applications have been migrated to VMware.

It's very reliable. I have not had an issue with Dell EMC Unity. 

Their service is good. If there is an issue with our Unity, Dell will sometimes call me before I even know I received a notification. They will tell me that some disks are bad and needed replacement. Whenever we have issues, they respond very quickly. 

We are using all-flash disk, so the speed is very good.

The solution is stable.

We are a small bank. It is very scalable whenever we want to expand the disk storage. 

Dell EMC technical support is very good. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. They take you by the hand and walk you through every issue. They explain the issue and follow up on it.

Whenever we need help to service the system or apply any upgrades, their customer service is good.

We used Dell EMC for the setup. We had a Dell EMC engineer and a third-party engineer come in. The Dell EMC engineer came and set up what he had for the disk. He took away the complexity from us, so I didn't see it. We had a third-party help us as well during the installation. 

My part was mainly just administering the system. If I had an issue, I just made a short phone call to Dell EMC.

In the past, we used to have a physical server dedicated for Exchange or SQL. We have been able to virtualize those systems. Therefore, we cut our costs on the hardware and the backup is simpler in a VM environment. With Unity, we can easily replicate all our data to our production. 

For DR, the solution is very efficient for us. It has also allowed us to centralize our data repository.

While Dell EMC is costly, I don't have any complaints about their licensing model.

We have also used Dell EMC CLARiiON and Symmetrix within the Dell EMC shop. What attracted to us to Dell EMC Unity was its flash disk technology.

Outside of Dell EMC, we looked at IBM and HPE. However, we have VMware as a recovery point for replication, and those VMware solutions work together well with Unity.

The purchasing process was uncomplicated. We went through a third-party reseller who has a relationship with Dell. They know the product well, so they specialize in it. We gave them our needs and they were able to recommend the appropriate solution to Dell, the sizing, etc. This helped us out. 

We can sleep at night because the support is great.

We use it as block storage for a couple sites. 

The performance is fine for what it does. It is flash and spinning media.

For sites that we use it on, it gives us more flexibility and high availability solutions. It is easier to expand the site, if needed.

It is simple to use and easy to manage. We don't touch it after we set it up. It is not something you constantly have to go in everyday and tweak, which makes it beneficial.

• Ease of use: The GUI management is very easy to use.
• The management is easy for us. We rarely touch it now. It just runs.

I would like the UI to look better.

Stability is very good. It has been running for over a year now without problems. We haven't had any dropped layers.

The growth is difficult to forecast, but it's easy for the unit to grow when needed. It is very scalable.

The technical support does alright.

We didn't have a solution in place for the size that we needed to have a high availability solution. Dell EMC is our preferred storage provider, so we went out and worked with them to get a solution where we have a cluster environment to VMware and a failover with the other node along with shared storage.

The initial setup was very straightforward. This was not our first SAN array, so I just racked and stacked it, and they gave us the IPs and turned it over to us. 

The purchasing has been simple. When you do need storage, you spec it out. Then, you receive a quote back and make a decision from there. 

The last purchase was in China, so I was more on the config, less on the purchase side.

The solution should be cheaper.

We evaluated NetApp. We decided on Dell EMC because we are more familiar with them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Price.

We use it for virtualization. We have all of our servers virtualized on the entire unit.

The performance has been outstanding. It's amazing.

We currently have two Dell EMC Unities going. One of them at our primary on-premise DR site. They communicate with each other. If we ever have to failover, it is right there and ready.

We have integrated Dell EMC Unity XT with VMware, Exchange, Microsoft SQL, and all types of Windows servers running on it. It outperforms any other physical hardware that I have ever had. We had to purchase the licenses for the Exchange and SQL servers. We also had to purchase VMware, and that could be cheaper.

We are also using it with our Veeam solution for our backup. Everything is just integrated so seamlessly. It is great.

The ease of use. Being able to configure it was easy, which I liked. 

It is easy to manage. Managing it, I get alerts if there are any type of issues. I had a hard drive go bad, which had never caused any issues. Dell EMC contacted me, and said, "We are a shipping a new one out." My response was, "Why?" He told me that hard drive was bad. So, I went and looked, and it was. This was almost immediate. I never even knew anything had happened.

As frequently as updates come in, it has far more updates than anything else, Dell does it for you, which makes it simple to do them. I just sit back and watch them do it, so it's nice. It keeps us up-to-date and secure.

It should be lighter. It takes up a ton of rack space. It would be nice to have a smaller footprint. 

It might be nice to have more integrated features instead of having everything as a separate module, like the networking. The networking is attached separately in the back. It would be nice if that was more integrated with less ports.

One to three years.

Stability is perfect and consistent. We have had no downtime. It is reliable.

As far as hardware goes, we haven't had to scale up at all. We're staying pretty steady. 

As far as users go, I have about 1000 users on it right now, and it's not even at 50%. It's amazing as far as utilization goes.

Technical support is top-notch. I have talked to them a couple times. They definitely seem to know what they are talking about. They are pretty quick to get parts out, and getting a tech out there to replace them.

This is our first time that we moved into virtualization. We are largely an HPE shop.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I had a technician do it for me, then I looked over his shoulder because I had never done it before. He told me that he would do it this one time, and next time I would set it up because it was not that hard. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't impossible.

It was very easy to order. We went through and spec'd it out internally, then went through a Dell EMC partner and spec'd it out through them. The parts were here quickly, assembled, and all we had to do was mount it. We didn't have to do any configuring nor assembly, which was good.

Dell EMC did setup number one. Then, they shadowed me when I did the next setup. It's not simple, but it's doable. It's doable with the right guidance.

Deployment with the product is great.

When I first got the Dell EMC Unity system, I converted all of our physical machines to virtual, which:

• Eliminated the need for a $300,000 cost upfront to extend warranties.
• Eliminated the electricity that was being used along with other inadvertent items, such as cooling. The AC doesn't run as much in the data center now. 
• We went from about 45 servers down to one, which is amazing. 
• As far as purchasing additional servers, there is no need to buy hardware. It's all right there. Since we have deployed, this has easily saved us close to about $300,000 easily.

The time to set up has definitely improved. That is ROI for us. We save time spinning up a new server. If you ask me today for a new server, I can have it ready by the end up the day. When we were using hardware, it would take us about three weeks. We would have to provision a server. We would have to spec it out, buy it, assemble it, install the OS, back it, then we were finally ready to go. Whereas now, by the end of the day, I have a very nice server.

Simplicity of ownership is a no-brainer:

• Obtaining a warranty is easy.
• The price is very reasonable.
• As far as licensing goes, I love how VMware works with Dell EMC Unity. It's great. They work hand in hand. They have made it so simple.

We looked at VxRail, IBM, and Nutanix. Dell EMC Unity work out financially. VxRail was nice, but a lot more expensive and robust. Price-wise, Dell EMC Unity was right where we needed it to be.

Make sure to shop around to make absolutely 100% certain that it is what you want. You will want to come back to this particular model. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Pricing
• Knowledge: They know what they are talking about. 
• Aggressiveness: Are they vested in the pricing and product?

We are a medical center, so we have a very diverse ecosystem. We do a lot of imaging, which is our primary use case.

It is performing very well.

It has helped us be able to use less administrators per device or system. Therefore,we are more streamlined.

The management is key. This is where we see the functionality and ease of use. To be programmatically administered is huge, it is one of the key features that we like about it. My team finds it easy to manage.

We have integrated it with vSphere.

• The interface is easy to use.
• The ability to programmatically manage it.

It needs more functionality and the ability to move across more landscapes.

Stability is rock solid.

We haven't found a scale that we can't go to yet.

Historically, we are a Dell shop. We actually asked Dell's solution experts to come in and give us a suggestion of where we needed to go before purchasing this solution.

Our big return of investment is the ability to scale and not add FTE counts nor extra administration.

It was easy to order. We are a big Dell shop, so it was easy to purchase and get it in place, then up and running.

Find out what your use case is. Look at it across the board. Dell EMC has been good to us as a customer.

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.

The primary use case is to replace stream I/O and other VNX traditional spinning disks with a less expensive all flash. However, it should have the same five nines availability.

It's easier to carve out months and present them to hosts as opposed to some of the older Dell EMC solutions.

The majority of our vSphere environment is running on Dell EMC Unity. Exchange is also running on it. Most of our environment is split-up. Only really mission critical applications are on stream I/O. Unity has ended up being our main storage platform.

It is all cost-based. It's as good as a VMAX All Flash with stream I/O. In terms of our use case, we're not thinking of deduplication. However, looking at it based on cost per gigabyte, it's certainly very effective.

Dell EMC Unity is not sexy. It doesn't have all the flash and pizzazz of some of the other storage vendors.

We've had no issues with it. 

The performance is great. We have four or five different Unity arrays, and they have all run flawlessly.

I haven't used technical support.

Dell EMC did the entirety of the setup.

We have seen tremendous ROI.

Because of the attractive price, we were able to get rid of more expensive arrays, standardize, and get rid of a lot of spinning disks. We also got rid of more expensive flash that we weren't properly utilizing.

I've had so many nightmares with so many other arrays, but I have no complaints with Dell EMC Unity at this time.

It is a workhorse and will run even demanding workloads.

We are using it as a storage unit. We also using it at my customer site.

It is the storage provider that the company is using. The product is easy to manage.

It provides SAN capabilities and storage replication.

• The user interface could use improvement.
• They could move away from flash and make it an HTML5 file. 
• They should update to the cloud.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

The technical support is very professional and provides quick responses. 

When using the callback function, we found it to be good. It is also good for creating cases. 

I haven't experienced anything bad with the support yet.

I was not involved with the initial setup. I haven't worked with it that long.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: good support and fair price.