Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

• Inline compression
• Auto-shrink
• Data in-place upgrades

Definitely the biggest requirement is deduplication. The EMC Unity Platform doesn’t have this feature, yet it was a part of the predecessor VNX series. Customers cannot afford to keep duplicates of data on such a tier.

We have used it for about six months with multiple deployments during this period.

The operating environment is very stable. I have no complaints and no bugs were noticed so far.

All the models in the series/family have a specific range of scalability. I believe there never was an issue on this, its predecessors, or with the Unity.

SAN is a scale-up technology. Usually when a system needs to be upgraded to handle more workloads or requires to scale up more than the existing systems’ capability, you do not need to do a traditional "fork-lift" upgrade. You do not need to get a bigger SAN and then do the traditional migration from the old SAN to the new one.

You can simply replace the existing storage processors one at a time with a higher model SP and voila, you’re done! Now you’re upgraded from model A to model B with higher scalability and better configurations.

I would give them a rating of "11/10".

I have worked with NetApp, Dell Compellent, Dell EqualLogic, and HPE EVA systems.

• Dell: Too complicated for configuration and management utilization
• NetApp: A very good product when it comes to a file environment. However, they are quite restrictive with their block protocols.
• HPE EVA: Not as reliable as a NetApp or EMC.

The initial setup was simple and straightforward with a friendly interface, wizard driven, and no extra utilities required.

Unity is a good product since all the software required is already bundled.

We previously evaluated Compellent, EqualLogic, MD series, NetApp FAS, Nimble and HPE EVA.

Go for it!

Our primary use case is for our product, Oracle Database, and it's performing very well.

The benefit of the solution is that it allows us to maintain an Oracle Database for our product, for our customers. Given the performance of the Unity array, we've been able to do more with less.

It's just a solid platform.

I would like to see better compression, better dedupe. It's not nearly as good as what is built into the XtremIO. I understand why that is the case, but if they can take some of that technology and leverage that a little bit better in the Unity array, that would be great. That would be the first improvement.

It's rock solid. All of the EMC arrays are rock solid. I wouldn't expect anything less.

Scalability is phenomenal.

Technical support is typically very good. The only issue is, where our products are located. it's hard to get technical support in there. Only certain individuals can go in there, so finding that right, cleared person is sometimes a challenge.

This is just the next generation. We started with the CX models, we went to the Celerra, and now we're only blocks. We've used the 5300, the 5400s. We've used them all for years and years.

When selecting a vendor what's important are 

• price
• the name
• the product itself 
• most importantly, stability. 

I need to know that I've got a device that's running and it's not going to go down; that has rock-solid stability. That's the issue.

The initial setup is different from the VNX arrays and the CX arrays, which we have played with and used for years. The interface is just different.

Previously, we manually did all of our RAID groups. We didn't use the pools in the VNX2, we just went down to RAID groups because that would give us the best performance. We could maintain that performance, we could control that. With Unity, that went away, so that was a little bit of a learning curve. We had to understand and learn to trust that it was going to do what it needed to do.

Compared to XtremeIO, the unity is a two out of 10. Compared to other products, like Compellent, which is a Dell product, I think it's better than the Compellent. I think it's better than the 3PAR, I think it's better than the Netapp. The whole VNX/Unity line has been the industry leader, as far as I'm concerned. if I were to rank the Unity against all of its equivalent competitors, I would say it's probably a nine out of 10.

I would give a colleague the advice that he needs to look at what his product does, or what the use case is for that device. The Unity array is, by design, block, with unified on top of it. NetApp is, by default, file, with a block added on, which is kind of a hybrid; it's not really block at all. It depends on what you're doing. If you're looking for a filer, NetApp is the way to go. But if you're looking for block storage, by far EMC Unity is the way to go. That is its design.

We're running virtual machines and we're using the NAS filer for file shares.

It has reduced the latency in application and database reads and writes, which is of benefit to the business.

All-flash, it's fast. We have the 650 model which is all-flash, upgraded from VNX. It just flies.

I can't think of any improvements, other than bringing down the price point. That would help.

It seems rock solid so far.

At this point, we're at the high end. I don't know that we have a lot of room to scale up, but I think it's going to meet our needs for a while.

My colleague did a firmware upgrade recently and that went well. I would say that was a good experience with tech support.

We were running out of disk space, and there was some latency that we wanted to improve on. We had the VNX previously.

When selecting a vendor, the price is always important, but we need a product that supports our business, It's both those factors.

The setup went relatively well. It was straightforward. We got migrated over quickly, so I have been very pleased with all of it.

It's working well for us so far. We haven't had it long enough to have a full-term answer, but I am very pleased with it so far.

In terms of advice to a colleague, if it's a mid-size company that has a similar needs to ours, I think the Unity is a good option.

It's our production SAN. In terms of performance, I've had a few issues, a lot of error messages that they haven't been able to figure out yet. 

I do like to be able, in a DR scenario, to use it to failover if we have to. That was our original use case, but we've actually gotten away from that for now, because it was just too cumbersome to do a failover, a data center failover, using Unity.

We can get to our applications faster. That's the biggest plus that we've seen with it. 

The reason we purchased it was for dual data centers. We have one in each data center so that we can have that redundancy, that failover if needed. 

Obviously, flash, everything's quicker. We did notice a lot of speed difference.

We actually started out with XtremIO, and we were running our SQL servers off XtremIO, but our application servers couldn't keep up. So now, our application servers are all on flash, SQL Servers are all on XtremIO, and the two work together well.

One of the issues we've had is that controllers have crashed several times. Just today I received a message that a dump file was detected. We've had a lot of problems with the storage processor, SPBs. We've actually had them crash. Luckily, nothing went down.

We purchased big enough that we haven't had to worry about scalability yet.

Tech support is knowledgeable. We get the answers when we need them, they get us back up.

Originally we had the EMC VNX, and support was up on it. So it was either going to be: buy support for the VNX or move to Unity. The money came out the same, so our decision was to move to Unity.

I would rate the unity at six out of 10 because of the errors that we are receiving.

If I were advising a colleague, right now I'd probably have them move to another solution. There are other flash arrays. They may not have the Dell EMC name, but they are performing just as well at a lower cost point.

General storage for virtual machines. The virtual machines have different roles, essential roles; and, of course, mission-critical servers running financial services, or engineering programs, etc.

I have a client that jumped from the stone age to hybrid. They do enjoy the hybrid storage, the fast cache, etc. It has greatly improved their performance, absolutely. The customer is really happy about it.

It is the performance combined with the Gig-per-dollar value. That combination is superior to other storage options.

All the features that the client has, the client has really enjoyed them.

One thing they could do is lower the price point. There are other storage products that are available from Dell, the SE series for example. The client is comparing the Unity and the SE3000 for example, the SE is cheaper.

So far so good. No issues with stability.

I'm sure scalability will be fine. It will be great. But the client has not reached the point of needing to increase the capacity, or other features, yet.

So far technical support is very reliable, it's very good that way. We haven't engaged tech support so far, but when did the deployment we did have Dell EMC come in and provide deployment services, and that went through pretty well.

We picked Dell deployment services, so it was very straightforward. The Dell technician came in on time and then, according to the survey that the client filled out earlier - it was great. The client was impressed.

I give it an eight out of 10 and the two missing points are because of the price tag.

In terms of advice, I would definitely recommend Dell solutions. As for Unity, it depends on the budget. I definitely recommend Unity, because I do have clients that are currently using it, and they don't have any issues, they're happy with the product.

Our primary usage is for our users on our civilian side. We deal with both military and civilian, but it's mainly for our civilian users. We recently started using it, six months ago. Our customers like it a lot. It's an improvement from what we were using. We use it for our Outlook and Exchange but we haven't implemented with our VMware yet.

It gives us an easier way to manage our users. We have a lot of users, so it's better on that side of things. Compared to the HPE product we were using beforehand, it's definitely simpler. The interface is smoother too compared to the HPE product. The team that we have now prefers it, so far.

The interface is pretty easy and it didn't take too long to get trained on it.

We haven't had any issues with it, any outages. We have a lot of users and it's been able to handle our high usage rate.

We haven't increased in size much. Given the user rate we're at now, we think it will probably scale pretty easily without having any issues.

We have not had to use technical support.

We were using HPE before. It wasn't that we needed to switch, but we switched because we were having a few issues. They wanted to try something new. When we did so, the users and the IT team and the customers preferred it. They thought it was a lot smoother.

Because we work with the DoD, they have a list of devices that are approved. That's the list they go off of.

It was more our Tier 3 team that did the setup, but they didn't have any issues with it. Most of them have a lot of experience with a lot of equipment so, it was pretty smooth.

I definitely see value in it. We will probably implement it in other locations that we have as well, since we currently only use it at our main location. It has definitely been useful equipment.

If a friend or colleague was using the equipment that we were using beforehand, we'd definitely tell them to transition over because it is a lot easier to use.

I'd rate it about a nine out of ten. It's smooth, has been an easy transition, the interface is a lot easier than the one we were working with. The setup was easy and we haven't had any problems with it. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's really good equipment.

We did a one-month exercise with EMC. We are trying to replace several systems, like NAS and some file shares, put them into one consolidated system. We do have VDI. We're going to re-use it for VDI, so this is the perspective we're trying to evolve toward.

We're replacing legacy hardware and hardware that is going out of support, and we are consolidating two or three systems into one. We also do have some special security requirements that Unity can meet.

The NAS capability is mainly what we're looking for from this product, and being able to recover fast in DR.

I don't think at this stage we have a specific concern. They have answered most of our concerns in terms of scalability and being future-proof.

We actually haven't tested it yet.

I believe it is scalable.

Dell EMC is actually one of the strategic vendors we work with, so they have quite a big presence at our bank. We meet with them at least once every two weeks.

I believe the setup is going to be straightforward because they have this tool that migrates the data seamlessly, and you don't have any system downtime. I believe it is called Datadobi. It takes out all your data from one system to another and makes it seamless.

Most of the infrastructure we have is from Dell EMC, so we're locked in with Dell but that's fine. If you're happy with the specific product and vendor, why change?

Most of our customers buy it for data storage for the ERP that they use in their businesses. Most of them have a preference for the flash model.

All of them are very satisfied with the performance. It's very good equipment. Our customers give us very good feedback about it, they are very satisfied.

It's very easy to manage the whole system. We can put all the virtualized servers in one place, so they can share and manage the devices very easily.

It is very high-speed. The compression is also a very good feature, and the deduplication as well.

No complaints about the stability. Our customers are very happy with it.

Most of our customers are medium-sized businesses. My market, my targets, they don't need high-scale performance. But I know the scalability is very good and you can scale very easily.

The TCO is very good. Our customers invest and they get a good return.

When selecting a vendor, I choose the storage to fit the value and budget that the customer can afford. I can set most of them up with Unity, but sometimes I need to give them something with a lower cost. Sometimes, the price point is a little bit high in our market.

Unity is equipment that, if you sell it, you don't have any headaches with it. It's very good, its performance is very good. We are very satisfied.