Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We use Dell EMC Unity XT for its normal application for DB, Oracle, SQL and VMware and the file system, too.

The feature that I have found most valuable is the unified storage and its capabilities for block-access, file access, and the center box.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say its capacity and its connection.

It has good stability

It requires only one technician for deployment and maintenance.

Its scalability is good.

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup was very easy.

I can advise that Dell EMC Unity XT is a good solution.

On a scale of one to ten I would give it a 9.

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.

The main use case for my clients is for mid-range storage performance. It's primarily all-flash arrays. It's always with two sides replicated. It's working well.

The architecture is robust. I know that it has changed a lot with the advent of the all-flash. But it was the good, old-fashioned storage array, block array for customers. It's reliable.

The feedback I have is it's quite stable. We have a configuration with VPLEX. The issues are not coming from the Unity itself, in general. It's more about the SAN or the VPLEX, the virtualization layer. On that specific point, I'd say the Unity is doing well. It's reliable.

The market I'm working, in Switzerland, is quite small. The Unity, in terms of scalability, covers 90% of our use cases.

Replication with VMware - it's called the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster - is lacking in the Unity and is present in Compellent. In general, that's a key decision metric. If we need to have synchronous replication... That's why we had to use VPLEX, because it's not in the Unity. Look out for this. If that kind of setup is not required, you should always go for Unity.

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.

Primary use case is mid-range to low-end storage, and it performs very well for that type of operation.

We just recently put together a large customer deal. They're going to use Unity's for applications at remote sites, so it's essentially a robo operation. Its main advantage over vSAN was the rebuild, the intelligence of the restoration in the event of a hardware drive failure and, of course, the all-flash solution.

The flexibility of the paradigm and, obviously, its price point.

I'd like to see more of the NVMe back-end for the flash. And the big deal with the PowerMax is that they've used all U2 drives so that they can avoid having to take it down. I see using M.2 and modular sections as being a real nice alternative that could be implemented in Unity at a fairly low cost.

Obviously, we haven't had it in the field for years, but we haven't had any problems with it and we've deployed close to 150 of them.

It's not really scalable. Up to mid-range requirements, it's just fine. But scalability takes you to the enterprise-class, and that's more high-end VNX or low-end Symmetrix.

We've used technical support but it wasn't Unity's fault, it was the customer's. The tech support is very good.

Setup is simple.

For our applications, we'd rate Unity at eight out of 10. It would be a 10 if it had a lower cost. That's really the issue. The value point is, once you get into the Unity spectrum, you're looking at a lot of competitive offerings, and they're appealing to a limited class requirement, so the demands are not as stringent.

In terms of advice, find out what your storage group's expertise level is and their background, and then see if they don't already have experience with Unity or one of the others in the family. It seems to be a natural fit that way.

As a partner, we are able to deploy it across multiple industries: healthcare, government, small business. We install Unity everywhere. There is really no one, set, niche customer that we do it for.

• Starting small and being able to grow to a larger scale
• All-flash options are great
• Hybrid options are good for certain use cases

The code revisions. I think that they could do a better job of testing on the back-end, for the code revisions. I've heard of some issues down the line where people have upgraded to the latest code and there were bugs in it, and they had to release a subsequent code fix. More testing on the Dell EMC side, for when they release those code revisions, would be a good idea.

It is stable. I have not personally seen any issues when deploying in a customer environment.

Technical support has gotten worse since the merger, for example, response time to SR creation. And mainly, if I ask for a solution, they'll send me a white paper and say, "Here, just do it, here's a KB article." They seem to be more hands-off, and they just want to let the customer or the partner deal with it.

Another big thing that is somewhat upsetting is that they got rid of partner support, installation support. We really liked that. Being a partner and installing, if we run into issues while on site, with doing any type of work, we don't have a number to call anymore, a direct line. We have to go through the same process, and that process is terrible, still.

Most of the customers that I have are old VNX customers, and they want to replace their VNX with the latest and greatest, so they go to Unity. The Unity is a VNXE but on steroids. That's the main use that I see, just part of a refresh cycle, and they want to refresh with the Unity's.

It's very simple to set up. No issues with the setup.

Nothing is ever a perfect 10 in my book, so I would say this solution is a seven. I think there is room for improvement, there is always going to be room for improvement, especially in IT. Having a perfect 10 in any IT hardware platform, I don't it think that exists right now.

The simplicity of the technology means it is easier for my team to do administration, to deliver.

The technology is simple and it is efficient.

The product is reliable.

It is scalable. For example, at this moment I have a large customer, a government ministry in Costa Rica. We have two Unity's with services for transactions on different scales. It has grown over the course of six months. 

From my experience, EMC provides good support, and Dell's service is very good. It is simple to call technical support and they immediately respond.

With EMC technology, you don't really need support. We have been dealing with EMC for 14 years. We were the first company in Costa Rica to use EMC. We have 14 or 15 devices and we no have problems with this technology.

My technical personnel have implemented different fixes or upgrades. I have good internal technical support in my company.

It decreased the amount of time to deploy and we recognized the ROI quicker. The ability to use a single piece of hardware simplifies the overall administration.

Unified block and file storage without the need of control stations and data movers. This simplifies administration and deployment and requires less rack space.

• Increased flexibility in the GUI to provision storage easier
• Include cloud-based replication for blocks

We didn’t encounter any stability issues.

We didn’t encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support was pretty good. However, the Dell/EMC merger has been challenging across the board.

We were using EMC VNX. We switched because this was a newer version of an aging technology.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. It is simple with a single IP. It recognizes arrays without pre-populating with IP addresses.

The price is good for commercial grade storage arrays. Licensing has changed to be more advantageous for users.

We didn’t have any alternatives in mind.

If you are looking for a unified solution for block and file and to be competitive in the all-flash market, this is the product to choose.