What needs improvement with Dell EMC Unity XT?

Data replication needs improvement as the future roadmap for RecoverPoint appliance is not there.

The challenge we face with Dell Unity XT is availability in some African countries where we operate. In some countries, spare part availability is an issue for us. Dell needs to find some local warehouses. We provide network services in countries like Uganda and Tanzania. If the server fails in those countries and you don't get spare parts, replacing it takes a very long time. We buy the tool in bulk for some countries, and it becomes a big challenge for us if there is an issue and we get no support.

It would be great if the solution could integrate an NVMe disk.

The only challenge I've ever had was with a Drive firmware upgrade. However, when I did an on-prem performance [assessment], it didn't pose much of a problem.

We need to improve the controller to work as active-active. We also need to improve the snapshot on the Unity site.

The product’s pricing should be improved.

There is an issue with data duplication occurring on the flash memory. It should be improved. Also, timely updates and upgrades to the latest versions would be great.

They place a strong emphasis on service, occasionally requiring approvals. However, with full installations, they have achieved almost uniformity. Their storage approach differs from a consolidated business-based model; instead, it is application-centric. Their investment in solutions is geared towards specific needs, such as the banking or information system, acquiring smaller storage units individually.

Dell Unity XT’s price needs improvement.

One of the major challenges we faced with this solution was regarding DPE. When the failure of DPE happens, it needs to be replaced with another part as Dell Unity XT offers a single data processor. Finding the replacement can be a complex task because it's hard to search for the exact part number since that information is not as public as other solutions, such as HPE, provide. Also, since it requires extensive research of the product, it's not very secure. Working on the complexity of these issues would be helpful.

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.

Its replication technology could be better. There is no option to postpone the replication after a failure.

It would be better if there were more integrations.

It's not a feature, but I'd like to see licensing costs reduced.

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

We would like to see more advanced integration capability added to this solution.

The user interface could be improved. The Dell Compellent user interface is fantastic, but the Unity user interface is, in comparison, pretty lousy. It's functional, and I can do what I need, but the Dell Compellent user interface is so much more intuitive and user-friendly. I wish that the product had some more flexibility. It seems it's purposely designed to not have a lot of flexibility, and as a customer, I don't appreciate it.

We haven't faced any issues so far. The pricing is a bit high. We'd like it to come down.

The CLI is not object oriented like Powershell is. You can't make host or volumegroups to assign volumes in a consistent manner (same LUN ID) , nor add a host to inherit a volumegroup. I can't think of any other solution that doesn't have that feature. If you try the CLI and script around to add multiple volumes to multiple hosts, the vCenter integration and rescanning on the host takes ages. Its not workeable, your script is actually having an HTTPS session and waits on ESX host rescans completion before it actually proceeds with the next volume, there is no understanding of adding all volumes at first and scanning the hosts at the end. Dreadfull , like standing in the queue for one poststamp each time, instead of once for 20 poststamps. The only good thing about it is that the name of the LUN is the name of your datastore on the ESX host. The activation of the datareduction propagated by DELL is far to low. Ratios of 1,5 to 1 up to 2 on 1 is too low. I recomend only applying datareduction on DB servers. There you tend to reach 2:1 up to nearly 3 in some instances. Also the system uses its main core Processor for datadeduplucation and there are other vendors (in the same lower midrange) that offload all of it to a module specially crafted for it. The XT is merely an x50 with more cores nothing more, no real innovation but in many cases it does a good job , in the sense that high CPU rates are a major concern, especially if you use datareduction on (nearly) all workloads. True the compute part might me less expensive then the disks, but this might shift overtime. I recommend Powervault with higher datareduction ratios of 4:1 and live migrations within a clustered setup. I really do not see the use case for Unity anymore once you have the cheaper Powerstore in the house that has so many usefull features. It actually beats Unity XT on all aspects and costs less. It scales up and out and facilitates migrations an item we all confronted with sooner or later. What is also a problem is that once the system is initiated with all ethernet onboard, there is no way to pull out an ethernet module and replace it with an non identical (eg upgrade your ethernet module with another module with more BW) or a FC module. So basically you can't upgrade on that side. I don't see why. Surely one needs to have the driver, but support was clear, its only only possible when you reinitialise your unit.

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.

The price of Dell Unity XT could improve.

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.

This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for. I have limited budgets for IT solutions so it would be great to provide Dell's solutions at a lower cost.

They can certainly improve in terms of monitoring. The monitoring could be improved, and more features could be added.

Dell EMC Unity XT improvement point should be in the area of enhancements or innovation. It would be a benefit to have some kind of intelligence built into the solution with respect to the workload of their firmware. For example, if Dell EMC Unity XT is running an Oracle load or SQL application, we have to do other functions on it, find self remedies, or find self alerts to allow the administrator of the database to good insight into what exactly is happening in the storage layer. We are using different tools to retrieve partial information from the storage. Having more artificial intelligence tools built into the solution would be a great benefit. This would allow us to see more about the workloads and higher visibility, such as performance degradation.

Dell operates at the commodity end of the market, so if they really want to get into storage in a big way, they need to have better pre-sales technical support and engagement. They do what they say, but if it was a really big implementation, I would be worried about recommending Dell EMC Unity XT, simply because we need to have a more technical understanding of it. The technical engagement can be a lot better.

It could be improved in the area of management flexibility. For example, I really need to set read-only access for LUNs, and there's no such option with Unity XT. I would also like to see more support for object storage for S3. NetApp includes basic support for S3 to the on-top array, so it would be great if DELL EMC would include S3 for the Unity XT.

Our request to Dell EMC for improvement was in the reporting and monitoring areas. Dell EMC built up a cloud ID so that we could see the overall storage numbers. We needed to have the proper KPIs to be able to see and manage things.

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

We use VMware in a number of projects but there isn't very good visualization of the storage from VMware or vice versa. I'm hopeful this improves in the follow on product, PowerStore.

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

One area of improvement is replication. We are also using Oracle virtual machines, and when you are using systems from other vendors, the process of replicating from Unity through OLVM is more laborious than when we were using VPLEX. It takes a little more work when we are incorporating a third-party environment.

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.

The interface and configuration could improve.

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

The UEMCLI is not an object-oriented CLI and the more object-rich PowerCLI has been discontinued. Only people with bash experience possibly can operate it. Still nowadays, feeding object from one command into another is still a burden with such CLI. Moreover when one adds one disk on a vSphere cluster. When adding a few disks to a cluster, the CLI is actually standing in the queue for one disk to be added to all, requiring multiple scans on each membering host, before proceeding with the second... One could add all disks at once and scan instead , and stand in the queue once. There isn't a means to add volumegroups , nor hostgroups. A feature that any solution I worked with so far has. Its a burden to assure each host has the same LUN ID on each host in this manner. The integration with vCenter comes with a sideeffect, in that it will take control of the vSphere scan process, moreover every esx host is scanned multiple times. It takes easiliy a few hours to add a few LUNS to a few hosts. Rather Painfull.Even with unisphere you can keep up with that pace. Support Responsiveness & time to fix bugs should be improved. We have an open bug for over a year. It requires substantial rewriting of the code and untill the next major release the problem remains unresolved.

Currently, the protocol SNMP is not implemented. That's a problem, as we follow this protocol and I can't check the integrity of this equipment.

This solution would be improved with the addition of flexible raid volumes.

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.

This product needs to have better integration with enterprise backup solutions and archiving devices. Also, it would be improved with better flexibility for replicating with third-party SAN storage products. There are some SAN solutions that help customers to manage their data centers easier than the past.

We would like to see the synchronous replication process included in the next release. Not having this downgraded our performance by 65 percent. This really needs to be improved.

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.

The dedupe and compression ratios on the Unity are not quite where we want them. We are getting better data efficiencies on the VNX than we are on the new Unity. We found this a bit interesting. We would like to see improvement there. We noticed in the last release of code that there were some inefficiencies around getting our data efficiency up in terms of dedupe and compression.

It is missing some features, like deduplication.

If you compare it with VMAX, where we communicate with the box through Solutions Enabler and there are a lot of commands and a lot of flexibility, the command line for Unity needs to enhanced.

The application's administration needs improvement and become better. It previously was better.

I would like better monitoring capabilities: more historical data with more insight into the performance for the database. We now use a separate tool for it. Therefore, it would be nice if we could have that straight from the tool.

I don't think we are really pushing our Unity, which we have discussed with Dell EMC. I would like them to continue to build on the solution and expand on the functionality, like replication.

What I'd like to see is a little more detail on the networking side. I can go into where it's showing me the replication, but when I go into the network it just gives me broad-based information. I don't know which replication job is actually feeding it. I have to go in and rely on other apps. But I'm thinking, "It's on there. It should be able to tell me this is the one that's eating up the bandwidth."

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.

As the solution continues to grow and gain more traction, things will come up that will just continue to deepen the integration between VMware, vCenter, and all those other components. Anything in the divisibility there and additional tools is always great.

We'd like to see a cheaper version of an all-flash array in that footprint.

I haven't seen the roadmap for this solution.

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.

There were a couple features that came out a little later than we originally believed, but they did come pretty much on time and met our schedule.

* Storage groups are no longer available in Unity so you will have some challenges if you managed quite a huge environment in provisioning perspective. * Domain management is also gone in Unity. This is not an issue if you are managing less than two of this, but in our case, we have a number of this array around the globe. * All models are limited up to two I/O modules per SP giving you fewer front-end ports compare to higher VNX models. * Unisphere Central is not so useful as we expect. This will provide a centralized management of our arrays, but it ends up giving you only some numbers and figures for you to report to your management.

We would like an AI feature that would protect the backup and minimize the consumed space so that we can maintain the quality of the backup. This would help us minimize our IT cost in terms of backup procedures. In addition, we would like to see the solution integrate easier with any cloud provider. There is a rising demand for moving to the hybrid cloud environment and Dell EMC needs to integrate to these needs.

Support and licensing are big things, in the end, that needs improvement.

We have had issues with the capacity and some misunderstandings on how much compression that we should be able to see out-of-the-box. When we were originally sold the box, it was before the merger. The salesman promised us at least a 50 percent compression on the box, so we ordered it with 2TBs of storage. That was a mistake, because now we are locked into smaller drivess. When it comes down to it, we are running out of space. We realized that were barley getting a 12 percent compression offset, not the 50 percent, and this came about the time of the merger. All of this was happening and a lot of people in the company did not return emails at the time. I guess it's because they were no longer with the company or they knew they wouldn't be, that's just speculation. However, it took us several months and almost ruined the our reputation during that time period. They did make right on it and sent us several drives to double the storage on our devises for free, so they made it right towards the end, but it took a while. The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing.

We're probably going to be looking into vSAN just to minimize the footprint. We've already minimized the footprint going from VNX to the Unity, but as we're virtualizing more and more, once we're completely virtualized, we'd probably be looking into vSAN through either VxRail or VxRack, and go that way. The smaller the footprint at the data center, the less cost there is.

I would like to see better automation of upgrades, more seemless upgrades.

It needs deduplication. We'd like to have the dedupe capabilities in the Unity.

The only thing that could improve it would be a price reduction.

The biggest one for us, and the reason we don't use it more, is that we can't throttle the replication speed. If it's on, it's on. So we have to be a little more WAN-sensitive, in some applications, which means we can't put it everywhere. That's the biggest issue for us, by far.

I'm looking for more automation, not only for VVOLs, but for NFS and RDM disk.

I would like better integration with RecoverPoint. My major issue with the solution, all around, has been RecoverPoint more than Unity. While I like the easy user interface, I would like some more advanced features for troubleshooting built into the product, so that we can do more in-depth problem-solving. The issue we're having right now is that we can't really see much in the interface. Support can see more, but we can't see what's going on, so we have to rely on support to send us things. I would like something that a power user, an advanced user, a subject matter expert, could actually look at and say, "Okay, this is what's going on here," to make troubleshooting easier, instead of just the happy, bubbly alerts.

It could always use native replication. Then I could get rid of RecoverPoint.

On the data domains - for the Unity product, but specifically for data domains - I would like a much easier interface for managing, for actually going in and having one place where I could get all of the different parts of the overall unit. And I would also like to be able to identify individual disks a lot more easily.

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.

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.

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.

There could always be improvements to the UI. For what we've been using it for it's been great, but there are always little tweaks that could happen there.

Unity only does compression. It would be nice if there was a deduplication feature as well. At my previous job, we used XtremIO and that had deduplication and not compression, and I think we got more out of it because the more OSs you have that are the same, the fewer copies it needs to keep of all that data. So, the deduplication would be a nice feature to have.

I would like to see more compression and deduplication added to the solution. Today, our compression is about 2:1 and other solutions give us about 4:1 or 5:1.

The Active Directory integration isn't very good, it is kind of limiting. It's okay. When you get into more advanced storage administration, it's really hard to find that stuff, but those situations are few and far between, so it's not that relevant. Also, I called about an issue where I couldn't get VVOLs registered. It turns out it is a bug in the code and that there is no information about when it will be fixed. It's just not going to work. I was a little miffed about that, especially getting more into VVOLs with Pure Storage, but it is what it is. I would like to see better support for VVOLs and a less hokey AD-integrated login. Those are probably the two things that bug me the most.

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

Dell EMC Unity is not sexy. It doesn't have all the flash and pizzazz of some of the other storage vendors.

It still has the same implementation headaches of the VNX that came before it. It's still the same Unisphere, it's all the same tools from the VNX, nothing has really changed, from my perspective. It's still all the same stuff we're used to seeing. The management of it just isn't very strong, whereas a lot of the tasks I do day-to-day on some of the newer competitors, like Pure and Kaminario - we're talking three to five seconds to get something done rather than 15-20 minutes. It's a big time saver on the other systems. With the Unity, once it's installed, raw performance works fine. In future releases, I would like to see automatic upgrades from one to the next, when this system is coming out and the next one is coming in; more akin to what Pure Storage is doing. That would be really helpful.

* The user interface could use improvement. * They could move away from flash and make it an HTML5 file. * They should update to the cloud.

I would like the UI to look better.

It should be lighter. It takes up a ton of rack space. It would be nice to have a smaller footprint. It might be nice to have more integrated features instead of having everything as a separate module, like the networking. The networking is attached separately in the back. It would be nice if that was more integrated with less ports.

There are a lot of things that can be done with it. It's got Cloud IQ, but I think it's not as mature as it could be, they could make it more effective. They could make it more comparable to some of the other products out there that have cloud analytics. The amount of insight that the Unity product is able to give, at this point, is okay, but not class-leading. Some of the other data-reduction technologies, like deduplication, are not to the level of other competitors and what their products provide. I'm nitpicking here and there. Overall, it's a solid product.

* I would like to see more integration with other products. * The interface can be a little challenging for someone new.

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.

It has ticked all the boxes for us so far. A fourth year of maintenance at a good price would be good.

I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage.

I would like to see a more seamless virtual box integration with the physical box which can replicate, because the setup of the replication is very difficult right now. We tried it multiple times, and while the physical box is easy, when we mixed it with a virtual edition and it seemed very complex. We been trying this for several months, even with the cabling included. We are still working on it.

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.

We integrated it with vSphere but that integration was "iffy". It was okay but we had a few challenges with it.

It needs more functionality and the ability to move across more landscapes.

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 don't think at this stage we have a specific concern. They have answered most of our concerns in terms of scalability and being future-proof.

* One-to-many replication. * Data deduplication. * Asynchronous Fibre Channel replication. It is asynchronous on iSCSI and I would like to have that on the Fibre Channel. * Unisphere-wise, I have to log in to each Unity as a unique environment. In VNX, I logged in to the domain and I was logged in to every VNX. So that's missing. * I miss storage groups. Now, if I have to add a LUN to a cluster, multiple host, I have to know which host is in that cluster. I have to write it down and that makes it hard. In VNX and earlier, I could simply put a LUN on a storage group and every host in the group had the LUN. This lack bothers me a lot because it takes a lot of time and mistakes are made. Sometimes, a Hyper-V host gets a VMware LUN and vice-versa. Not good.