Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

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.

Mostly, it is used for the storage of a fertilization environment. It performs fine.

All the features are okay, but not all of our customers are using all the features.

The features are nice, but you can't use every feature, because it costs in performance. Therefore, you have to choose which features to use to achieve a better environment. That is why customers do not use every feature in Unity.

It is very stable. While I have had downtime, it has mostly been due to a bug in the MCX version.

Scalability is good.

Since Dell took over EMC, the support has been very bad. Before, the support was fine. Now, the support is slow or they don't react.

As a partner company, if EMC does not react immediately, it is not good. Because if there are any issues with the customer, then we need assistance. However, it is getting better and could be better.

The VNX is also a good system, but Unity is a little better. I am not saying it is much better, but it is better than the VNX. 

Just use EMC.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The product itself.
2. How the product is used.

• Storage
• Easy to manage and configure.
• I can easily setup and configure the LUN and host without support.

Alert notification via SMS. If the product could only send alert notification via SMS, it would be much better. This is needed mostly when you are not in the office and have no access to email. Therefore, you could check immediately if there was an issue.

Nine months.

No issues.

No issues.

100%. They are very accommodating, and it is easy to contact them.

This solution is much better than the previous one.

The initial setup is straightforward. All I need to do is to configure the LUN and host.

This device is worth it.

No.

The product is easy to use and configure. The support is also superb.

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.

We can use Dell EMC Unity XT for backing up SAN and NAS drives. Mainly for databases and for file servers.

The most valuable feature is the dynamic cache of this product. It is very important. We have the physical cache and we can boost this cache using disks. All the products are mainly flash now and this is one of the main characteristics which our customers like.

I have a problem because between the Unity XT and the PowerMax, sometimes we need another product between these two products. There could be better integrated and the capacity of the size could be larger.

In the future, if NVMe disc could be used on the Dell EMC Unity XT it would be beneficial.

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

Dell EMC Unity XT is very reliable.  I used to use legacy EMC products, such as VNX. This product has a long story.

The solution is suitable for Medium-sized companies. When you talk large, it's relative. Our customers here in Algeria are the largest here but they are only medium-sized compared to other countries.

The technical support is good. Opening the ticket, the management of the ticket is good. However, when we have to use or change parts, it can be more difficult because of the customs rules of the disposability and availability of the parts. We have problems delivering them in the time the parts are needed in some cases.

We previously used Fujitsu and IBM products.

When comparing Dell and IBM they are very similar. Fujitsu is a good product too. However, when comparing them all in their strengths for implementation, the lifecycle of the product, and the support they provide, I would rank Dell number one, IBM second, and third would be Fujitsu.

The initial setup is simple. The time it takes for the implementation depends. From scratch, a new implementation takes approximately three days. If you have to migrate a node storage array, the time can increase, I am not able to give an exact time because it depends on the volume and the nature of the data. We can take one week to three weeks to migrate. However, generally, it takes approximately 10 days when we have to migrate and without migration, it's about two and three days.

We provide implementation service to our customers.

The maintenance is done by the Dell representative in our country.

The solution is very expensive. 

There are a lot of advantages with EMC Unity XT, there's no limitation. When you bought the product, the software is included and there's no limitation of the terabyte in the licenses.

I would firmly recommend this solution to others.

I rate Dell EMC Unity XT a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

• Small device
• Using few U's on rack
• Small consumption of energy
• Fast access on data

The best improvement will happen in the future. We will hopefully not be replacing the HDD with failure.

The price has room for improvement.

I have used this product since May 2017.

Not at all. No issues with stability.

I will need to see in the future. I do not have time for scalability for the time being to determine whether it can scale out.