Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

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 currently have three Dell EMC Unity XT units, all used for different applications.

The primary use case is general, all-around storage. We use it for both unstructured file and unstructured block storage and a lot of it is attached through a few systems to VMware.

The applications are databases and other similar products.

One of the units is used for diagnostic imaging, and another is used for file services such as the Hospital Management System (HMS).

I don't have metrics but this product benefits us because of its reliability. It's like a black box that sits in the background and just runs. It works great and does everything that's asked of it.

The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs.

This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.

It could be a little easier to attach it to a network file system.

I have been working with Dell EMC Unity XT for approximately four years. It has been at the company for five years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We haven't really had to scale it too much. Whatever we've had to do, it's been able to accommodate what we need. We know that it can grow more but we just don't need it to. Also, we're shifting away from it because it's being replaced.

Dell's technical support is great for 99% of things.

There have been a few problems but I understand because the product was not mainstream. The unit was an FS8600 and there were only about 12 people in all of North America who knew it well. That's why we got rid of it.

Overall, I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten. I don't give anybody a ten because there is always room for improvement.

The organization did not have a previous solution. The original two devices were brought in specifically for the tasks that they perform. The third one is dedicated to the new HSM software.

We have other storage, on-premises. We have different storage for different things. For example, we have two Dell Compellent units, as well as Isilon. We run the gamut of everything.

We are retiring two of our Unity XT units because we bought a Dell EMC PowerStore. We're updating everything as part of our refresh cycle. We will be keeping the last Unity XT for at least two more years because it's a fairly new system. It will probably be replaced by a PowerStore as well.

I was not with the company when it was initially set up but I have set up other ones. This product is straightforward and easy to set up. It is almost set-and-forget, where you get it on the floor and away you go.

It took me less than a day to deploy, from unboxing to putting it on the raised floor to powering it on and having my first system attached to it.

I deployed it myself. I have been working with storage products for more than 20 years.

It is myself and two others that are responsible for the maintenance. All of us are backup and storage engineers. I am the primary and the other two are my backups. We all take different approaches and handle different things.

For purchases, we have always dealt with Dell through a third party because until recently, Dell did not do direct sales. The company we used was Techni-Core and they're okay. We've had some issues with them including some improperly configured Isilons and other systems that were not done correctly. Back when I first joined, I had to go in and spend four months debugging a system that was set up wrong.

I think that they had a couple of people that were poor at doing installs but I'm pretty sure they are now gone because I don't see their names anywhere.

We see a return on investment because this product just runs. We don't have to spend hours maintaining it. It needs less intervention from us which means that we can spend time on other things.

This solution is a good price for what you get.

We are a Dell customer so we did not evaluate options from other vendors.

Everything that we have is Dell unless it is something that is vendor-issued or vendor-specific.

We only touch the edge of what this product can do. It can do more than we use it for, such as file replication between two units.

There is not much needed in terms of improvement. It is a rock-solid product.

My advice for anybody who is considering the Dell Unity XT is to just enjoy it. It's a great system that is easy to maintain. Right out of the box, it's a good system. It's not the best that I've ever used but it's pretty close.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Right now, Unity is a backup target.

The IT challenge we resolved with this solution was having a backup target. With Unity we've got DDVE, or Data Domain Virtual Edition loaded. It was an array that was not being used for anything in particular and we had a need for the data domain capacity, so we're using it as a backup target under DDVE.

The Unity platform is really easy to use. When it comes to provisioning and management, it has reduced complexity and improved productivity. The ease of the UI means it's not a very complicated system to manage.

For me, the most valuable feature is the ease of management. It's a fairly easy system to manage compared to PowerMax or VMAX.

In other use cases for which we used that particular Unity box, before it landed up being what it is now, the data service feature we used most was snapshots. Snapshots made it easy to roll back to a point in time.

We plan to buy Unity again in the next 12 months and we'll have to see what the next generation of Unity brings to us. But so far, there are no additional features needed.

There's always room for improvement with the UI. That can be a little cumbersome at times.

The stability is good.

The scalability is also good.

We haven't had to call technical support. It has been a pretty solid product.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's an easy piece of equipment to manage.

We are enterprise-level and buy directly from Dell EMC.

Our shortlist had IBM XIV Gen2. We landed on Unity because we had familiarity with the product. Unity has its roots in VNX and we had a number of VNX arrays.

Unity is solid and there is not anything to be afraid of in purchasing it. I would recommend it.

Ours is not a very complicated use case and the performance has been adequate for what we've tasked it to do.

I give the Unity a ten out of ten for two reasons:

• reliability
• ease of use.

We use it for data storage, for file.

When it comes to provisioning and management, the solution has reduced complexity because we combined several systems down into one. We're utilizing that technology to see what we have available for file, instead of multiple technologies, and trying to converge all of that together to understand what our capacity management meets are.

Also, Unity's are more easily administrated, so we need fewer people to do the administration. We have less overhead because of that.

We do replication and snapshotting. We're using that as a backup technology to leverage snapshotting.

We went to the PowerMax because of the needs that we have for the business. We're doing true enterprise-level storage. So we went from Unity to PowerMax to give us that tier that we were looking for.

It's stable. It works well.

We had a lot of different solutions. They were all piecemeal'ed. We have manufacturing sites in 80 countries and every site did their own thing until corporate brought it back in. That's when we started to go with Unity. And now we're making the transition to PowerMax.

We use Dell EMC because they're the premier player.

We used one of our premier partners to implement it. 

My advice is to take this solution. It does what it tells you it's going to do.

Instead of using multiple types of backup or file storage, we were trying to combine all of that into Unity. Now we're trying to refresh that again and go with the newer technology, the enterprise-level storage. Unity met our overall performance expectations for what it is, and then we obviously needed the enterprise level, so we're going with the PowerMax now.

I would rate Unity at eight out of ten. Any application or product has room for improvement. I don't see anything out there that's a ten. Unity is functional for what it needs to be.

It's our storage solution. We have a Dell EMC Unity 400. The performance is great.

The fact that it's hybrid is the most valuable feature. We have the SSD so we put our SharePoint on there and some of the stuff that requires a little more speed. For SharePoint, we want the pages to respond a little more quickly. And it's nice to be able to use the slower storage for stuff that we don't need as quickly, like file servers. If they're a little slow, it's okay, nobody really complains. Overall, the hybrid is what we really like about it.

I like that when you log in it gives you a dashboard of what your storage looks like. Pretty cool with that.

In the dashboard there could be notification of duplicate files and the like, so we don't have to rely on Windows to do that. They have all the files in the Dell EMC so that would help us out.

I haven't had any issues with it at all. The stability has been very good.

Dell EMC is one of the best in terms of scalability. They can just add another component to it. It's so modular so it's super easy. The scalability is very nice.

We had a year's worth of support from them when we first bought it. They were very responsive, whether via email or phone calls. We could get a tech onsite if we wanted to, to help us with the installation.

We had Tintri before. It was good, it's also a very simple solution. The problem was that they got too expensive, once you tried to scale up with them. They quoted us something like $800,000. We said to ourselves, "Um, let's go to Dell EMC. We know Dell, we know EMC, so let's just switch."

In the industry in which we work, a lot of people use Dell EMC and there weren't a lot of Tintri users. Being able to reach out to somebody in another company who uses Dell EMC makes that partnership with everyone a lot easier too.

Setting it up was super easy, as is the management of it. We used the same thing for setting up a disaster site and it was pretty seamless.

I don't know an actual number for ROI but, especially because we are a small IT shop, having something that is easy, that doesn't take a lot of time to set up, monitor, and manage helps us a ton. We can focus on other things.

When you look at what Dell EMC is compared to, like NetApp, they're all priced pretty similarly. I think the pricing of the hybrid model is good. Obviously, we would want cheaper prices but you can't get everything.

My advice would be to use their support. If you bought it, have them come onsite, have them help you set it up, make sure you get comfortable with it. If you bought the support have someone come onsite. It's like free training. Don't wing it.

Dell Unity XT is used for almost all types of mid-range requirements, such as databases, virtualization, file services, and other applications, for example, exchange servers.

Dell Unity XT has unified storage which provides both blocks, and file protocols, which helps to get rid of separate storage for each purpose.

The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is its support of protocols for both block, and file levels. It has the features a store solution should have.

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

The stability of Dell Unity XT is great. We have not received any complaints about errors or failures in deployments.

We have more than 10 customers using Dell Unity XT. We are focusing on Dell PowerStore more because it is a newer product. We would like to convert our customers from Dell Unity XT to Dell PowerStore.

The scalability of Dell Unity XT is very good.

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

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

Positive

Dell Unity XT is straightforward to set up.

One person can handle the configuration and deployment, but a helper is needed for rack mounting and cabling.

The features of Dell Unity XT allow support of both block-level and file-level protocols and provides a good return on investment because customers don't need to purchase separate storage systems for each protocol.

The pricing of Dell Unity XT is good.

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

If a customer is considering implementing Dell Unity XT, I would advise them to also purchase the implementation from professionals to receive the best results.

I rate Dell Unity XT an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for customers who are looking for a cost-effective option that provides an end-to-end solution for servers, backups, and storage.

The unified storage feature is valuable because it means my customers don't require the setup of a separate mass. They can use the existing storage system as a mass.

Using this solution has meant that I do not need to look for different partners to provide me with solutions like a backup service. Dell provides end-to-end solutions.

This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for. 

I have a limited budget for IT solutions so it would be great to provide Dell's solutions at a lower cost. 

I have been using this solution for five years. 

This is a scalable solution. 

I would rate the customer service for this solution an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I have previously used HPE. HPE only offers hardware and so we needed to find a cloud-based solution. 

From a pricing perspective, this solution is comparable to others on the market. 

This solution requires regular maintenance from a dedicated team. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

We are using it mostly for VMware and Wintel. It is also for applications, like SQL, which need to be used on multiple different operating system, such as Windows, Linux, and sometimes Citrix. We use it with virtualized infrastructure.

We use QoS and snapshots features, which I like.

Unity provides a complete storage solution for VMware on a Wintel Windows box for various applications, such as SQL or Patron Databases. It is seamless, and it sits there providing all the storage and connectivity, so we can forget about it. Unity takes care of itself, solving all the basic needs of a robust infrastructure.

It is easy to deploy. That is the best feature that I like, because I used to fly into locations to install a Unity. We used to have an expense of $5,000 on the product. Now, I just send whomever is onsite over there locally with the initialization information in a text file. Then, they can put it in a USB drive, come back, and it's deployed. Afterwards, I can remotely access it, saving us $5,000 every time. It is not very expensive, so the value added is you get big bang for your buck.

If I can connect to my Unity through my iPad or my cellphone to check everything is okay and view the information via a dashboard. 

I would like to have secure mobile connectivity going forward. This would help me be more proactive.

It is pretty stable. I like the stability, because everything works like it should. We made it all redundant. So, we don't have anything to worry about.

We are so virtual that we have two of us managing the whole infrastructure. Everything is taken care of and highly available. Nothing is vulnerable at all. Everything is good. There have been no issues at all, so far.

We have 30 to 40 Unities out there in the field. We don't even scratch the full capabilities of the Unity. We are at about 20 to 30 percent utilization. It is just provisioned so well that we are sitting at 90 percent performance level. We have it well-provisioned so we don't need to worry about performance for the next five years.

It is quite scalable. If you want to add on, you can add on easily. We have a 25-slot enclosure and are probably at 15 right now. If we purchase a big company, need to scale up, we can easily scale up. 

If there's any issues with a hard drive or any other hardware components, Dell EMC is contacted, then they will call us back to schedule to get into the data center to replace something. This is all virtual. Support is not a problem, because it's automatically taken care of. Only thing we have to do is to give them access to the data center to go do what they need to do to fix it proactively.

The local account team and system engineer are the best part of working with Dell EMC.

Everything is becoming virtual. Then, cloud transformation is being considered right now. Everybody is going over there. We want to evaluate everything, and if the cloud solution is good for us, we'll go there. Everything will be in the cloud.