Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a unified storage, and it is useful for mid-range storage. All the SME clients of our company that we have here trying to implement SAP want to use the three-tier architecture for server storage, and they all find that Dell Unity XT is one of the leading products, and our company sells a lot of boxes because of the aforementioned reason.

I don't see any weaknesses in the product, nor did any of our company's clients report any issues. The only issue is with the product's scalability because it's not as scalable as the other polished tools in the market.

It would be good if Dell could work a little bit on the scalability front and make sure that they increase the bandwidth at the back end as well as make the product a more capacity-oriented one, and provide one petabyte to make the solution easier to use.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for six to seven years. I am a system integrator. My company has a partnership with Dell. I am also a reseller of the solution.

It is a stable solution that sells a lot. Though we have sold Dell Unity XT to bigger companies, it is Dell PowerStore that we have sold the most to bigger companies that have around 1,000 to 5,000 users.

The product's scalability has some issues.

The solution's technical support is very good. We haven't faced any issues with the support team. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Before Dell Unity XT, we were familiar with IBM and had sold a lot of IBM Storwize V3700 storage boxes.

The storage boxes by IBM are not number one in the market since they were not unified storage but SAN storage. Though IBM launched unified storage, our company does not sell much of IBM. After IBM launched unified storage, they allowed Lenovo to sell off their storage, and our company stopped selling IBM products.

The deployment phase of the product was very easy.

The solution can be deployed in four to five hours.

I need two certified personnel in NetApp and Dell to carry out the deployment process.

Dell Unity XT's prices are very competitive compared to HP MSA2000, an entry-level product and another higher-level storage box. Compared to the prices of the storage boxes offered by HP, Dell's prices are competitive.

All the licenses are included from day one of your purchase of the product, so you don't have to buy licenses separately. There are no additional costs to be paid for the maintenance of the solution.

I suggest to those planning to buy the solution to buy it with a five-year warranty rather than the standard three-year warranty provided by Dell since it will be, price-wise, cheap for them. It is better to negotiate during the current because later on, the prices for the warranty will increase from ten percent to twenty percent, and you will stand to lose if you don't sign up for a five-year warranty offered by Dell.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

I use Unity XT to virtualize the customer's environment into scalable architecture. 

I like Unity XT's software-defined storage. It's a new feature that isn't widely used yet, but customers are impressed with it. 

Our customers are mostly happy with Unity except for the price. We primarily sell to enterprise companies because small companies cannot afford it. 

I have used Unity XT for three years. 

I rate Unity XT nine out of 10 for stability. Our customers are pleased with it. 

Dell Unity XT has a scalable architecture, but none of our customers scale it up significantly. Our client companies typically have 500 to 2,000 users. 

Dell's support is responsive. 

Setting up Unity XT is straightforward, and you need a week to get the solution up and running and migrate everything to the server. 

We typically sell Unity XT as a package solution containing four nodes. It costs about $150,000 for four nodes. 

We have explored solutions from HPE, but we felt Dell has a more comprehensive solution. Some people use VxRail for their VDI solution, but we have not seen anything like that yet.

I rate Dell Unity XT nine out of 10.

Our primary use case for Unity - we use the All-Flash, we don't use the Hybrid array - is as our go-to source for all of our virtualized Oracle Databases. We've moved about 95 percent of our Oracle Databases to Unity. There are a few extremely high-profile databases that nobody wants to move. Nobody wants to touch them. But pretty much everything else is on Unity. We're starting to branch out and put just regular, general purpose load on there. And we also recently put all of our Exchange environment on there as well.

We started going down the path of doing the vCenter integration, but we just ran out of time for testing it. That's on our bucket-list of things to do, because that'll make it even easier. But we haven't hit that yet.

As far as how Dell EMC Unity XT has performed, I don't think I've ever seen latencies above 10 milliseconds, unless it was something that wasn't the array that was messing up. The thing is rock-solid.

We've recently gone from a five-man team down to two, not because of the Unity solely, but we haven't necessarily had to replace everyone. We've been able to consolidate a lot of VNXs into just a couple of Unity's. We have less to manage and we need fewer people.

As far as the simplicity goes, adding hosts is easier. Everything is just about automatic. We're used to those old VNX1s, which are running Windows CE. Using the CLI on those is a little clunky, while logging into the CLI on the Unisphere is easy. It just makes sense, especially if you're used to Unix, because it's a Unix-based system. It's all-around easier to use.

• Being that we are heavily invested in VNX1s, the UI itself is fantastic, and the ease of administration is far better than Unisphere or Navisphere ever were. It's very easy to manage.
• The fact that it has built-in APIs means our automation people can help us automate a lot of tasks, and that has been helpful.
• And, of course, it's really fast. Obviously, that doesn't hurt anything at all.

One to three years.

At this point, we've only had one major issue, and we've had two of the systems in-house for a year and a half. The issue was fixed within a matter of hours by support. In that same year and a half, we've had a lot of other pieces of equipment that have had a lot of other issues, so the stability is great, at least for us.

We just recently started using the Dynamic Pools, so while it's scalable, we actually find it valuable that we can just pop in one or two drives when we need to, instead of having to add a whole RAID set. That has actually been very handy for us. A lot of the time, as a government organization, we don't always get all the money we ask for. Sometimes, the money that gets slated to us gets pulled out, last-minute, so we're trying to buy drives and hoard them. We always put drives in last-minute, and that's been extremely helpful.

I know that's not exactly the question in terms of scalability, but that has been more helpful to us than being able to add a zillion disks at a time. Being able to add onesies, twosies to a pool is really helpful.

The initial setup was very easy. I don't really remember any "gotchas."

We're a Dell EMC shop, we don't have any other storage vendors, so we don't really do a good job of looking into the storage vendors either. We have a good relationship with Dell EMC, we have a good sales guy and a good technical account manager. We trust them. When we told them that we had a lot of people asking for all-flash, that was the choice. We don't use enterprise-level stuff, we don't use VMAX. So we went with Unity.

When selecting a vendor, the relationship with the technical support is pretty important. We've been a Dell EMC shop for a long time, so there are some guys in the tech support whose emails I have. I don't necessarily have to open up an SR. If I just have a question I can just email them and I'll usually get a response in a day or two. That keeps me from having to do some of that paperwork. The other thing, when selecting a vendor, if I were the number-crunching guy: Obviously a vendor who's willing to work on price is always going to be helpful.

A piece of advice when it comes to research is to try to find another company that's using what you're considering. After you talk to the salespeople, after you get the dog and pony show, have them connect you with somebody who's using it, who they trust - maybe even someone you know or have some contact with - and get their thoughts about it. You usually get a lot more truth from those kinds of conversations.

We use it for our NAS systems and our SAN systems. On the NAS side, it's used for our end-users' home directories and Departmental shares. On the block side, we use it for VMware storage and we have it integrated with VMware. There was no additional cost for that integration.

We just started doing a bunch of automation where, if an end-user's home directory or Departmental share gets filled, I can set certain things through a Unity API so that if it reaches 95 or 98 percent full, it will automatically expand. Now, instead of our getting a ticket and having to go in and do it manually, it does that for us.

Our end-users are happy with the product, there are no issues.

The product is pretty easy to use. The GUI is nice, really easy to use, and the performance is good. 

For the upgrade from the old system to the new system, if there was a better way to integrate them so I could easily move the data without working all those nights and weekends, that would be nice.

Also, Dell EMC's competitor has a clustering technology. In the next release, it would be nice if they could build that into the product.

The product has been pretty good.

There was one minor issue where we would get these alerts every six hours, but they were fake alerts. We installed a patch a week ago and it fixed the issue. Other than that, no issues, the product has been stable.

We have a Unity 500, which scales to 500 drives, and we're about half full. But it's like their previous systems where you can add a couple of drives or a couple of shelves. There are no issues on that end.

Technical support has always been pretty good. Customer service includes the guys who come in and replace the drives and install the system, and those guys are good too. No issues.

We had the older generation of the Unity system, it was called EMC VNX. It's similar in some ways, but they've definitely improved the GUI, the user interface, and the performance.

When selecting a vendor, a big thing is support. We really need a company that, when something goes wrong, they're there and they can respond immediately, so we don't have to wait a certain amount of time. We experience a little bit of the waiting part with Dell EMC, but we have a technical account manager, and his job is to escalate. Since we already had that with EMC, it made sense to go with Dell EMC. So support would be number one. Number two would be performance, obviously. It has to work well.

The initial setup was pretty easy. We actually have a Dell EMC service engineer who came on site and helped set it up. I had to help in terms of getting all the infrastructure ready, but he did most of the heavy work.

The upgrading experience from our previous solution to this one is definitely better than it was with the VNX product. The only thing that we wished that it had is a way to migrate the data from the old system to the new system. We had to do a manual process for that. To move the data, we had to work a lot of nights and weekends. That was the hardest part of setting it up.

But other than that, it's better in every way.

I get fewer calls at night. That's my ROI.

NetApp and HPE were on our shortlist. HPE support is not good, so we didn't choose them. NetApp does have some good technology, but the relationship that we had with Dell EMC was the reason that we chose them.

In terms of the purchase process, we work with a rep. We have biweekly meetings. They're always on site. We worked with the Dell EMC sales engineer, making sure we got the right kind of drives, the right kind of performance, etc.

We are resellers and deploy the solution for our clients as a guard for storage on virtual machines, databases, and their VDI. 

The solution allows for easy, useful replication with good features for VPLEX and VIVO. 

The solution should include a free process in the HPE portal that uses serial numbers to verify that hardware is genuine. We find Chinese hardware easily but it is difficult to determine if it is genuine which causes problems. 

The solution should allow for connection and replication with other storage models such as HPE, IBM, and Hitachi.

I have been using the solution for two years. 

The solution is very stable and I rate it a ten out of ten. 

The solution is scalable within the storage limitations for each model.

For example, category 380 allows for one device. To scale up, you need to add additional software or hardware like VPLEX.

I rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

Our company handles software issues but uses technical support for hardware replacements. 

Due to sanctions in Iran, I am not permitted to contact technical support directly but must submit issue tickets through authorized agents. I am unable to rate technical support because I do not have direct access to them. 

The initial setup is very easy. 

Depending on the size of the project, we assign two to ten engineers for setup and deployment which can take a total of one to three hours. 

We also provide six hours administrative training to our customers via small, on-the-job courses we have created. 

Most licenses for the solution are free but upgrades are available when adding additional software or storage. 

The solution little or no cost so I rate it a ten out of ten. 

Supply of genuine hardware is challenging and there should be more availability in the market. I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Dell Unity XT is used for data storage at a data center.

Dell Unity XT has improved our organization's performance. We have seen reduced management times.

The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is data duplication. Additionally, the management interface is simple, and is not a hassle using it. You don't need too much to learn or to be familiarized with it.

Dell Unity XT could add a unit-to-unit replication. We haven't seen that because we don't have an additional one to test. However, it is not an improvement, but something that we would like to have visibility on how it's done or how it works.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for approximately two years.

Dell Unity XT is a very stable and reliable solution. We can leave the solution alone for a month without needing to check on how the unit is operating, or if there are problems. We realized the benefit of using the solution in approximately one year of use.

The scalability of Dell Unity XT is good because during the period of one year we noticed we had the need to add more and more systems, and more components to it and we were able to do it with no hassle. We do not plan to increase our usage.

We have approximately 500 endpoints using this solution.

The support from Dell Unity XT is good. They actively monitor the units. They have called us up when they have lost connection to one of the units to then take action. We have not had any issues to have needed to contact the support directly.

I rate the support of Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

Positive

I was previously using HP High-Performance Unit Storages. There was a need to purchase a new unit because we were struggling with the resources, performance, support, and other aspects. The best solution that was on offer that came to us was Dell Unity XT. The company decided to move to it and buy the full flash version to support all the applications that we have on-site.

The initial setup of Dell Unity XT was straightforward because we had Dell representatives involved with our team. 

We had to do a migration because we wanted to ensure that there was no downtime during the migration process from the old solution to the Dell Unity XT.  To complete everything live without the business noticing that something is going on in the background. 

You cannot have two groups of equipment that are deployed at the same time. For example, the host, storage, and switches. We had to ensure that everything is deployed, updated, and then do the connections between the two solutions and start with the migrations.

We use Dell representatives for the implementation of the solution. We ended up doing the configurations ourselves without needing the support. 80 percent of the deployment we did ourselves. We had two people involved in the deployment and the solution has not required any maintenance so far.

We deployed not only the one Dell Unity XT but a bunch of them. It took us approximately one week for everything to be finished. Additionally, we deployed some hosts, switches, and other systems.

We have received a return on investment using Dell Unity XT.

We were able to solve the performance issues we were having. Our core communications and infrastructure is dependent on these units. The fact that all of the systems that we have improved significantly in terms of performance. The organization has benefited or is happy with the investment they've done at this point.

We have received a full return on investment from using the solution for three to four years.

The price of Dell Unity XT is reasonable. However, if you are buying a custom solution, it can come at a considerable price. 

If you want to scale or add additional components, this is where the price starts to spike or become very complicated and expensive. If you purchase the components separately they can cost a lot.

We did not evaluate other solutions before choosing Dell Unity XT.

My advice to others would be for them to purchase the solution urgently if they need a backup solution.

I rate Dell Unity XT a ten out of ten.

We use it for mass and block storage. 

We have not had issues nor performance problems with it.

It has saved us time when provisioning new storage, so we're trying to automate that process.

It's pretty easy to use compared to the older version of the product, which was called VNX. This product is way easier to use.

It performs well. 

They have a Unity REST API that I use to automate some of the storage stuff. I'm just getting started with it, but it seems pretty easy to use.

Dell EMC Unity's competitor, NetApp, has a similar product. However, it has a clustering technology where you can group multiple systems together, then you can move data from one system to another seamlessly. I would like the Unity to do that.

It would be nice to have been able to easily move off our old VNX system to this system. The process is very manual.

The stability is fine.

We haven't really upgraded yet, but I know we can scale to about 500 drives with the system that we have. We are about halfway full. The scalability seems fine.

Technical support has been good and responsive. They know how to fix an issue.

Compared to our old platform, everything is more tightly integrated. I don't have to go to different sections to do something. A lot of it is wizard-driven, so it's an easy to use system.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy.

Deployment was pretty easy. We had a guy come in who did all the work.

Licensing is fine. We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity.

It's a good product.

We use the product with VMware, and also use it with Syft for home directory and departmental shares.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support.
• How long the company has existed.
• Is it an established company and product?
• Performance.

It is for our production. We also have a second one for disaster recovery. We use it for our VMware storage.

It's done everything we need and we have had no issues.

Since we have gone virtual, we've been using the SAN and the speed on our servers has increased along with the time to reboot and time for maintenance. We have built in our company's backup redundancies and the SANs both have Unities with replication, which has benefited with speed and reliability.

• Speed
• Reliability
• Support

It is easy to manage overall. It is all web-based. It has a an easy, nice dashboard. I receive emails if there are issues. When there are any updates, I receive emails. I can either do them on my own, but normally I schedule them with Dell EMC and they remote in, then it's done.

If there's anything Dell EMC could do to get the same performance for a cheaper price, that would be great.

It's awesome. It hasn't missed a beat. We haven't had any issues with it whatsoever. Speed has been great. It does everything we need.

There has been no downtime. It has built-in redundancy upon redundancy, so I feel very confident with it.

I'm using 25% of the available space for that drive. I can scale it as far as money could spend, as far as I can tell.

Their support cases are all handed through the portal. The support contacts me when they need to do upgrades. It has been great. It's all very well-handled, scheduled, and performed.

It's all been email-based portal cases. When they schedule remote sessions, they're on time. They get the job done and have been helpful every time I've needed them. I give them an A+ for support.

We were not using anything previously. We had 15 physical servers previously, so we knew it was time to change. This was part of a VMware virtualization project with SAN for the storage, so it made sense for us to go physical to virtual and use EMC Dell.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The vendor implemented it and is knowledgeable.

By doing virtual and reducing our footprint of servers, we're definitely not pulling as much power as we were. The time savings of not having to do virtual reboots rather than physical reboots of boxes. 

ROI probably has been more in time and uptime than in dollars saved. We have definitely had more uptime in the past year since we've been on this than we've had in previous years.

Dell EMC has a great portal for the licensing. It's very logical and easy to license. 

We integrated it with VMware vSphere at no additional cost. As we moved into VMware vSphere, this is what we bought to go with it for our storage performance.

When we were purchasing the product, we didn't have a capital budget for it. I sat down with my boss (the COO), and went over upcoming projects. We looked over the dollar values and if they fit. If it does fit, we do it. We went with the VAR that sold Dell EMC in our city and from there it was done. This made it very easy.

If it fits your budget, do it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: brand and support reputation.