Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

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.

We use it for ESXi data stores and performance seems to be okay so far. We've only had it a couple months. We have it integrated with VMware.

The benefits are the stability and that we're able to contact Dell EMC support for a quick turnaround. We have a higher level of support. If we have issues, they generally get fixed quickly.

Our hope is that they stay up, online, and that we will be able to update them while the data stores are operational. That is why we picked them.

Once it is set up, it is definitely easy to manage.

We've got an ongoing issue with a Unity in which some power supply fans spin up. We've had a whole bunch of hardware changed as a result but I still have an open SR, which has been a struggle. It doesn't seem to affect performance but it's something that we're hoping the engineers can resolve.

We have also had some issues with an upgrade where we can't manage a device, after the upgrade. So we had to have a ticket in for that.

The stability has been fine so far. We're good during normal operations.

In terms of scalability, the size is fine for the environment we have. We're usually at about half the capacity, so we have quite a bit more we can expand with. It's good.

In most situations, tech support works really well. If there are technical logs that they can diagnose and actually pull something out of, fantastic. If there aren't, if it's an abstract sort of issue, like the fan issues we're having, where they cycle every six minutes, it's taken me about six weeks.

They didn't believe me that the environment was not too hot. So they sent a technician out just to make sure that I could read the thermostat, that it was 68 degrees in our office. Then, they sent someone out to reseed each component, which I had already done. I didn't appreciate that part because I did some of those basics. I did exactly what they had said on the phone. The third time, they actually replaced some components and the fourth time they just sent the components to be replaced. It appeared to work, the fan issue did appear to go away, but it came back a couple of weeks later, after an update. I'm not sure if it's update-related, but it came back.

Because I've done the setup before with the VNXe version, it was straightforward. It's very similar to the VNXe.

Licensing has been quite difficult. It doesn't always auto-license. About half the time, when I provision one, I have to contact Service to get a license, or even go to our account manager to help get it straightened out.

Study the configurations of what you need to use and ensure you understand what you're provisioning. The procurement process can be a little daunting because there are a lot of features and there are a lot of components that you'll get set up with but which you may not need.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for me are global, 24-hour support; being able to get things fixed. After that, price, because we'll probably buy a thousand of them over time.

We primarily use the solution for storage for our online services.

The response time is good. It is suitable. 

The product is easy to use. It's not complicated at all.

We do have some sanctions in our country, and this solution is one of the options we have available to us. 

It is easy to set up the solution. 

You need to self-study. We'd like, however, to get professional training. It would be ideal to have some online sources available to us to help us understand its capabilities.

We cannot connect directly with Dell due to sanctions. We'd like to be able to connect to the distributor directly as sometimes we sometimes get the wrong information. It would help with transparency.

I've been dealing with the solution for about six months. 

It has been really stable up to this point. There are no bugs or glitches. It does not crash or freeze. 

There are three of us using the solution. We have more than 3,000 customers using the product. 

It's scalable. Everyone has been pretty happy with its capabilities. 

I've never dealt with technical support in the past. 

The product is not complicated to set up. The implementation is simple. 

It is quick to deploy. It took us about three weeks. 

We gathered the hardware, and we used the servers to connect to the host. It was pretty simple. 

We handled the deployment in-house with instructions or by looking at YouTube for direction. 

We have not witnessed an ROI at this point. That said, we do see that it is worth the money.

I'm not sure of the exact licensing cost of the solution. 

We are a broker. We're users. We are medium-sized, not enterprise-sized. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. It is easy to use, scalable, and easy to set up.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I am an end user.

We use Dell Unity XT as a block and file system.

The most valuable aspects of this solution are its stability, performance, and ease of updating. Overall, it provides good performance and stability.

There is no de-duplication. Unity used to be Bionics, which had de-duplication; however, in Dell Unity XT, the de-duplication was deprecated and is no longer available. 

The de-duplication function is back in the new Dell PowerStore, but it is missing in Dell Unity XT.

I have been working with Dell Unity XT for four years.

I have started to use a new product from Dell called PowerStore.

I still use Unity, but I stopped using Bionic because it's unsupported and, as far as I can tell, it will be discontinued in January 2022. 

It's nearing the end of support, which is why I purchased a new product known as PowerStore and am in the process of migrating to new storage at PowerStore.

I have time to check and test performance, as well as PowerStore, but I have extensive experience with Unity.

The version depends on whether it is a hardware or software version.

The hardware model is 400, and it is a hybrid store because the storage is shown as SAS and SSD disc.

Dell Unity XT is very stable.

I would rate the stability of Dell Unity XT a five out of five.

Dell Unity XT is scalable. It is easy to scale.

Scalability, I've done it a few times with new enclosures, and it's a simple process to connect and extend. It's straightforward.

I would rate the scalability a five out of five.

The product is not specifically designed for users but I believe it is for a few thousand or more clients. It is for our production where production services and applications are deployed and exposed to our clients.

Technical support is good.

In the four years that we have used this solution, it's been good, and I would rate technical support a five out of five.

It is simple to create a ticket, and they have good skills. 

I have the highest level of support for our mission-critical operations. 

It's very fast with good skills.

I am happy with the technical support.

I used two storage units a year ago. The Unity storage is newer, whereas the Bionic storage is older. However, Dell now manufactures new storage as a Dell PowerStore.

I have two products, Dell Unity XT, and Dell PowerStore.

It has three storage units. It was Bionics first, and Unity is now in production. And we have been using PowerStore for two years. I am still interested in using Unity because the end of support for Unity is in 2025.

Bionics' support is about to expire in a few months. I purchased PowerStore. It's storage; everything after that is flash storage. And I migrate from Bionics to PowerStore, but I believe I will continue to use Unity for a few years.

Bionics was the first product we deployed before moving to Dell Unity XT., and then to Dell PowerStore.

We moved from one location to another because the data center was our private cloud.

I am not familiar with the initial setup, because it was deployed when I went to this company.

I maintain this solution myself.

The license is not required, but we must renew the support every year, every two years.

I believe it is overpriced. I don't have a lot of experience with other vendors, but I believe it is expensive.

I would rate the price a three out of five.

PowerStore support is more efficient now that I have experience with it. I won't go back based on the cost of support; PowerStore is the most straightforward.

I would recommend this solution to others, but it depends on the need for de-duplication. If your data is encrypted or hidden, you don't need de-duplication. Dell Unity XT is good, but if the data isn't encrypted or is hidden, I recommend PowerStore. I would not recommend Unity where the data isn't encrypted and is hidden.

I would rate Dell Unity XT a seven out of ten because the de-duplication is missing.

We use it for user shares and VMs.

We have 200 people using it in our organization.

The snapshotting is slick.

I like how it separates the iSCSI drives from the standard shares. It has two different routes to it. I know most of the other solutions do this, but I just like the way that Dell EMC does it.

I like the dashboard, which gives me a quick reference on my monitor as to what is using what bandwidth.

It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there.

Our solution is four- to five-years-old. We use it every day.

I have never had any stability issues. It has been solid and stable. The dual platform, i.e., how it sits one head on top of the other, has been rock-solid. I have never had an issue with it.

I have noticed there is another version that has come out.

I haven't scaled it yet. The way that I set it up was half the drive bays are being used. When I do need to scale up, I am just going to duplicate the other half of the drives, stick them in there, and then spin them up.

The technical support is good and quick.

I would like a little faster response, but I don't think that their response is really that slow. They respond fairly quickly, at least fast enough for most issues. If it was an emergency issue, it might be different, as they probably would move it up the ladder anyway.

It is a little bit of a pain at first to set up the snapshotting. However, once it is set up, and you figure it out, it is not that bad.

I needed one of the specialists to set it up initially, which is not surprising because the solutions are a pain in that way. Some of the menus, and how it is at first, are a little awkward. It takes a little while to get used to, then it all starts to make sense.

I liked the price point when we purchased it.

I don't know what other units have that Unity doesn't have. Though I would say to them, "Keep up with your competition."

Look at it online. If you can get a demo version in-house, give it a shot.

If you need to keep data safe and make sure it doesn't go anywhere, Dell EMC Unity is a good way to go.

I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Unity is utilized primarily for our vSphere/vCenter environment. It is where we keep all of our data stores and all of our LUNs and anything to do with our vSphere environment. We really don't usually assign any LUNs directly to servers.

We have a large cluster environment and these are active clusters. There are times where the SQL cluster environment starts to get full and it's really easy to add a LUN or space without interruption. The customer is not even aware that the volume is about to run out of space. We can always just add more space and do data recovery for DRs without the customer's knowledge.

One of the features that I find most valuable is that it is easy to access. We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity.

The solution has been around in our environment for about five years. I've only been exposed to it for the past year and a half.

My impression of the stability is all positive.

We can always add more storage or more devices or more disks. There's always room for growth and it's easy to implement.

This is our primary source of storage and we plan to increase our usage. There's an objective coming in 2022 to increase storage. We have several terabytes and we are constantly chewing that up so there is an effort underway to expand.

I would like it to be a little bit easier to contact support. We can contact support, but we have to go through a phone tree. We get routed to different places. I might call support to say that I need a drive replaced and get transferred to three different groups before I get to the group I actually need.

Once we are able to get in touch with someone, and we have an engineer working with us, it's great the way they follow up. They constantly keep in touch with us whenever we have issues. They help schedule any type of upgrades and get them implemented. Overall, support has been very helpful.

And anytime there are notices of updates and upgrades, support keeps us involved and engaged.

Positive

We went to the Unity because of cost. I wasn't involved in the purchase of it, but the VPLEX maintenance was getting costly and it felt like the Unity was newer technology. The technology was better, the interface was better, interacting with it was better. It is a lot easier to use than the VPLEX. We figured it was a better solution than what we had and one that gave us more flexibility

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to set up.

Ours was a pretty large deployment. The Unity replaced our VPLEX environment so when we put the Unity in we had to do a lot of migration conversion from VPLEX to Unity. That was a process because we had a lot of VMs and data stores move. It took us about a day and a half to do everything.

We have five engineers who work on it, or who actually touch it or provide hands-on support for it. As far as the end-users go, we have about 500, and they have no idea they're on a Unity. What they know is that when they pull their machines up, they have storage and data.

We used CDW. Our experience with them was outstanding. They're great. I have no issues at all. CDW just did an outstanding job.

The return on investment is in the fact that it meets all of our storage needs and in the ease of expanding it. It's also seen through the fact that we can work on the environment without interruption to the end-user.

Do your due diligence. Check it out to see if Unity is something you can use for your environment. It is definitely worth looking into. Give it a try.

As far as the solution's functionality goes, I see no areas in need of improvement. Everything is functioning completely adequately. I have no complaints and no issues. I have no negative feedback. The implementation was easy and straightforward. Doing our recovery points is pretty straightforward. It is easy to access through a browser. We can add and remove LUNs on-the-fly with no impact at all to our environment.

We use this solution for remote sites with greater than 20TB & less than 100TB in block storage requirements. We utilize Dell EMC Unity 350f for ESX hosts and some CIFS & NFS NAS needs. We also use these arrays for DR needs to help control cost for primary block storage needs.

The Unity Arrays are easy to deploy and maintain. The All-Flash models are intuitive and easy to work with, in addition to providing high IOPS with low latency to support Business Critical applications. Because of the newer features and performance, it's easy to maintain and support remotely.

The All-Flash models are pretty fast for the vast majority of our remote workloads.
Encryption (data at rest - DAR) is easy to implement and has very little performance overhead.

CloudIQ SaaS is also a nice touch and is available for free. You can remotely monitor the health and performance of the arrays online or via a mobile app.

We would like to see the concept of Storage Groups brought back to this product line. Manually assigning new LUNs & removing LUNs at sites with a few ESX hosts in a cluster is fairly easy and straightforward, but when you have large clusters with twenty to thirty hosts, this becomes a burden.  Because of this, we have limited the use of Unity systems in our larger data centers.

Between two and three years.

It's our primary storage array. We have a public cloud hosted internally, and it's our primary storage array for our customer virtual machines. It has performed very well. There have been no problems with it. We've had it for about nine months and it has performed well.

Obviously, our customers rely on us for uptime. We've had no problems with it so far. Migration to it went very smoothly, so in terms of value to us, it's been very good at keeping our workload and our uptime going.

Also, it has definitely provided much faster performance.

Storage Snapshots have been really nice. They allow us to do backups without impacting our production workload that much.

The scalability, the ability to add disks dynamically and adjust our workload as needed, has also been really helpful. That definitely makes my job easier.

The interface for managing Unity is very easy. The integrations between VMware Hypervisor and Dell EMC are top-notch, so it's been really easy to use and manage. We already had solutions in place, so it was more just a matter of buying the hardware and migrating workloads over to it. There was no cost other than the purchase of the hardware and software licenses.

We had a couple issues, but they were very minor, related to storage Snapshots and our backup product, which is Veeam. That turned out to be a Veeam issue.

My only complaint would be some of the CLI Help files could be a little more detailed, but that's very minor complaint. We were trying to run some commands just to see how the storage snaps were interacting with the storage array, and it was a little difficult to look up exactly what commands should be run. The Help files detailing what exactly the commands did wasn't as detailed as we would have wanted them to be. They were very limited in scope. They could have been more detailed.

More integration with VMware would always be helpful, plugins that go directly into the vSphere management. A single pane of glass is always beneficial.

It's been very good at scaling when we've needed it to. It's been a good solution so far.

We have used technical support occasionally. There really have been no issues, we haven't had it that long. But just for implementation and licensing, we did contact support a couple of times. There were no issues with it. They were helpful.

We were using a VNX array, which was fine for the time when we had it, but we've expanded. The business is growing and we decided to invest in something a little more heavy-duty to handle the kind of IOPS that we're dealing with now. We are a Dell EMC partner. Obviously, that is who we wanted to go with.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is their relationship with us. In addition, easy use of the product and reliability are important. We rely on uptime, so we look for redundancy and reliability.

I didn't install the hardware, but I definitely assisted in setting it up: migrating workloads to it, setting up data stores, etc. The process was pretty straightforward. It was stuff I've done a hundred times before, so it was what I expected. It was not more complicated than what I would have hoped for.

We don't have many numbers in terms of ROI because we've only had it about nine months, but we definitely see the performance value.

We looked at a couple. We looked at Rubrik a little bit and we looked at some HPE arrays, but we decided to go with Dell EMC to keep up our partnership with them.

Ownership simplicity is there. Licensing was straightforward. We've always had good support from Dell EMC, we've never had a problem with them. Their solution engineers are always very helpful. So overall, no problems with ownership.

I give the Unity a nine out of ten. The Help files and a little more integration would be nice.