Dell EMC Unity XT Review

We bought a couple of 450F and 650F to replace our ageing VNX family. The primary use case is for block storage, and VMware for our tier-2 applications.

Moving away from Java-based Unisphere to the HTML5 version of Unity is a huge improvement for our day-to-day management. We are still in the process of getting things in place, but at this stage, I can say the configuration is pretty straightforward and doesn't require additional training to learn the product.

Moving also from a hybrid to an all-flash array helped us to minimize footprints in our data centers. It's like two racks of VNX 8000 down to a quarter rack of Unity 650F.

• New HTML5 GUI: It's really fast and works well on your favorite browsers.
• Data reduction: We haven't seen the actual benefits, but with this feature, we are expecting to gain maximum efficiency.
• CloudIQ integration: This provides really useful data and analysis.

• 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.