Dell Unity XT Room for Improvement

Srikanth Purushothaman - PeerSpot reviewer
DIRECTOR at Vellore Online Systems

We haven't faced any issues so far.

The pricing is a bit high. We'd like it to come down.

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Ricky Winandityo - PeerSpot reviewer
IT system infrastructure manager at Anabatic Technologies

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

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RP
Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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Buyer's Guide
Dell Unity XT
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Dell Unity XT. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Nagendra Nekkala. - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager ICT & Innovations at Bangalore International Airport Limited

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.

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Muhammed Imran - PeerSpot reviewer
Officer, System Administrator at SKGH

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

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PA
Storage Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

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. 

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MS
IT expert/sys admin at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

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.

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MG
Network manager at Farabi

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.

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MB
Works

We have used this solution for less than one year so I don't have any improvement suggestions yet.

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Steve McClendon - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a mining and metals company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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SV
Technical Specialist at Pouyan Pardazesh Tehran Co

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.

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CL
Consultant at TechData BIMA JSC

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.

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RP
Owner at FORE SOLUTIONS

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.

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CS
Managing Director at Infowhiz

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

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FG
Management Information System Officer at a mining and metals company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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IO
Senior IT Infrastructure & Data Center Operation Engineer at Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), Egypt

The monitoring capabilities should be improved.

The reporting should be better. In other systems, you can create many different kinds of reports but this is not the case with Dell.

Dell Unity is going out of support soon, which is bad. They should continue to support it, rather than have it end after five years.

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FR
CIO at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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BM
System Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

I would like the UI to look better.

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it_user628035 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at a hospitality company

The SAN provided by EMC exceeded our expectations. The only room for improvement I can see would be a faster leader time and lower cost. However, even with the lead time we had (which was approximately 10 days at the time of order) and cost we are very satisfied with the product.

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RS
Storage Solutions Architect at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This product lacks deduplication and compression at the current version 4.1.0. LACP is not available for iSCSI either.

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JB
IT Manager - Storage & Backup at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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DC
IT Manager at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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SN
GM IT Infrastructure at MSSL

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. 

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MH
Senior Director at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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GeorgeKaravitis - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at Digital Horizon

The price of Dell Unity XT could improve.

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PS
Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

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

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DT
Senior System Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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JD
Senior Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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MS
Assistant Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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HS
Works at a media company with 10,001+ employees

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. 

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GV
Senior Infrastructure Architect at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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JB
Virtualization engineer at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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JK
Senior IT Analyst at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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Eslam El-Sayaad - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Architect at BARQ Systems

It is expensive, and the pricing could be better.

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PA
System Senior Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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FB
Responsable de Production at Office National des Forets

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.

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SB
Senior IT Business Analyst at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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AP
Storage Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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OJ
Senior IT Systems Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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JD
Solution architect at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user866766 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Protection Architect at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees

The one thing that we would look at would be if they were to expand the file level features, just to give us a balance or a tier between it and Isilon options out there, for unstructured data.

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PO
System Analyst at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

In a Fiber Channel world, things aren't really evolving, they're pretty stable. The VVols will be something that we'll look into later on. Now, we use very traditional LUNs that are attached to VMware as data storage, so we're not yet using VASA or VVol stuff. But maybe that will be something that, in the near future, when we update VMware to the next operating system version, we'll look into.

There is an ESRS problem that we're facing where, for some reason, the other Unity has not been able to register to EMC. The support information is not upgrading and nobody can tell me what is wrong with it. It's a minor issue, the ESRS is still working, but it is something that is very confusing and nobody seems to know what to do about it.

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it_user758247 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are features still to come, like compression and deduplication on hybrid platforms, VDM improvements to be developed for NAS environments, and also improvements in the “self-migration” tools to push or pool information (to assist the migrations to and mostly from third-party arrays).

It has evolved from what it was one year and a half ago, but there are more features incoming with the scheduled “UnityOS” updates (planned on roadmap) that will provide the product with new features only available in VNX2, but most important, all newly added features will have no additional cost for the customers, because the platform is fully-licensed from the base configuration.

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JC
System Engineer at Duke Kunshan University

Dell Unity XT’s price needs improvement.

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RB
Systems Administrator at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

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.

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EN
Freelance IT Professional at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

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.

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Nick Hamilton - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise IT Architect at ESTI Consulting Services

I haven't seen the roadmap for this solution.

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AB
Storage and System Engineer at Thales Services SAS
  • 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.
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CK
Head of Team at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees

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

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VR
Customer support engineer at Al Khalili Technology LLC

It would be better if there were more integrations.

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MM
Storage Support Manager at Alinma Bank

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.

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MW
Director of Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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."

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AP
Storage Solutions Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user922881 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at a government with 11-50 employees

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. 

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RB
Senior Systems Engineer at BBH Solutions

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.

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TG
Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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

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RH
IT Manager at a transportation company with 201-500 employees

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.

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GS
Director of IT at a non-profit with 11-50 employees

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

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MM
Solution Architect - Data Center at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

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.

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BS
VP IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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LN
Information Technology Manager at a non-tech company with 201-500 employees

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

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Systemarchi67 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at Tebicom SA

The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication.

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Shashika Rathnayaka - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at OAK integrated System Pvt Ltd

Dell Unity XT could improve the compatibility of some of the features. Some of my customers had some problems. Additionally, it would be beneficial for the solution to have advanced AI and ML features.

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EB
Consultancy Department Chief with 201-500 employees

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.

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AT
Storage and Virtualization Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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BL
Server and Storage Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user865602 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Technical Services at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

There really aren't many weak spots, not many places to improve it.

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RK
Senior Storage Consultant at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
  • 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.
View full review »
DS
Senior Systems Engineer at Midland States Bank

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.

View full review »
JP
Senior systems program at a educational organization with 51-200 employees

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

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it_user866058 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

There is nothing needed at this time.

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OI
General Director at miromix unitedMiroMIX United

The product’s pricing should be improved.

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Dragan Knezevic - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Presales System Engineer at OBLAK tehnologije

Dell could improve Unity XT by adding support for NVMe.

View full review »
AW
Lead Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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.

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MU
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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.

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it_user513312 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user73656 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Solution Architecture at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Inline dedup compression security is coming up as an issue, encryption is key for our customers. If we could have more ways to do software-based encryption, those are the features customers are asking us for, as well as replication.

View full review »
JR
Pre Sales Manager at Datastar

VNX used to have some features that Unity still doesn't have. From that perspective, the progress is not that advanced, at least compared to what customers might expect.

View full review »
MG
Senior IT Infrastructure Engineer and Administrator at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Inline deduplication would be nice.
  • Better management of the hosts in Unisphere.
View full review »
FA
Works

LUN mask. The Host LUN ID is sequential by access in the hosts. When one LUN needs access by many hosts (for cluster purposes), in some cases the Host LUN ID remains different on each host. Storage groups or global IDs for LUNs could be a good solution for this.

View full review »
it_user763845 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager

The uses of tools to communicate with EMC directly. With EMC, I am not able to connect and resolve issues without assistance, so they can't do unattended maintenance on devices, which would be a massive benefit if they could.

They need a resource available to like grant them access or privileges onto the devices, so it can delay upgrades and fixes being put in places because we might not have a resource available who can assist them at that time.

If they could manage it remotely as they were, completely remotely without off-switching it, that would be a massive asset.

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it_user657789 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The EMC VNX Virtual Data Mover (VDM) software needs more improvement.

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it_user448698 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer in the Storage & Systems Practice at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The storage processors have less port expansion than previous high-end VNX arrays. Data compression is only available in all-flash pools.

View full review »
RC
IT Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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DH
Manager of Storage and Backup at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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MM
Network Administrator at a construction company with 201-500 employees

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.

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it_user866076 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development at SG Solutions Ltd

There aren't any improvements that come to mind, none that are obvious. After what I've seen today, here at the Dell EMC World 2018 conference, they pretty much have the next couple of years covered. For example, the current buzzword is the Cloud Tiering Appliance which allows you to tier data from your on-premise to the cloud or on-premise cloud.

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it_user649683 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I would love to see more compatibility between the different platforms within Dell EMC's portfolio.

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it_user865584 - PeerSpot reviewer
Design Architect at Alexander Open Systems

They added the dynamic pools, that was the biggest improvement. They have incorporated replication, RecoverPoint for BCDR, they have a good disaster recovery, they have a good replication strategy. I think they've got their spots covered.

View full review »
ST
Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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. 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 member host, before proceeding with the second and scanning all hosts once again. One could add all disks at once and stand in the queue once for a rescan all.

There isn't a means to add volume groups or host groups. A feature that any solution I worked with so far has. It's a burden to assure each host has the same LUN ID on each host in this manner. As of the June 2021 release, code OE 5.1, seems to offer the option to have host groups in the end!

===> Review 01/2023: Unity OE 5.1 came out with the notion of a host group

The integration with vCenter comes with a side effect, in that it will take control of the vSphere scan process, moreover, every esx host is scanned multiple times. It takes easily a few hours to add a few LUNS to a few hosts. This is rather painful. Even when adding LUNs using the Unisphere GUI, you can keep up with the pace of your script.

Support Responsiveness and time to fix bugs should be improved. Over the past 1.5 years, we had occasional controller reboots and we went all the way from OE 4.5 over 5.02 to 5.03, 5.1, and 5.2.1, and eliminated the most common causes. We still face a stress-triggered cache merge issue and though we provided the dumps and engineering acknowledged the bug, it has been told that addressing the bug requires substantial code rewriting and the problem will be fixed in the next major code release (OE 6.x). We are now two years later, still no fix, but fortunately, face the condition occasionally, and among even other bug checks.

===> Review update 01/2023

There was also a problem of a  Storage Processor Panic condition that could unveil after uptime in days had been reached. We had two such crashes and the uptime of our five units (ten controllers) showed they all bypassed the uptime, which had the potential to even crash the remaining eight controllers. Without much explanation on the cause (Typical at Dell EMC), it seems like a memory leak issue to me. We decided to reboot them all as a quick reply and later on to patch them on a more convenient maintenance window.

It was only until this summer that the issue is known and formalized to the public and listed as DTA 205836: Dell Unity: Storage Processors Running 5.1.X Code May Panic After 275-300 Days of Runtime (User Correctable)

All Unity systems running Unity Operating Environment (OE) version 5.1.X, but primarily Unity XT systems (480, 680, or 880, including F models), may experience SP panics after 275-300 days of runtime.

View full review »
MG
Pre-Sales and Technical Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

In terms of what could be improved, I would say the deduplication part, because for large deduplications, you need an extra appliance to do it in order to avoid having problems in performance. I think that could be improved, because everything should be included in the product, not with an appliance from the outside.

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PM
Assistant Manager Specialist at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The interface and configuration could improve.

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CD
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

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.

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AD
Infrastructure Team Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user866805 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Management Expert at Turkcell

The monitoring part could be better. With EMC storage systems - or Unity and VPLEX, because I'm using them, for the moment - the monitoring part is very difficult. They should improve this to have a better reporting system.

View full review »
it_user623847 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure and DWH/BI Manager with 5,001-10,000 employees

I have three suggestions: 

Improve the administrative user interface so it is easier to work with. Currently, a simple task, such as removing a host from 100 LUNS, takes a lot of time. If they could improve LUN to host model to be more like the EMC VPLEX, for example, it would be great.

Additionally we had one incident with a memory leak that led to controller reboot. Although it had no impact, when such things happens the storage should be more aware of it, send alerts, and propose corrective actions. 

Last (and I understand that it has a low chance of being implemented) the copy services currently are redirect on write. It would be great if the administrator could choose between redirect on write and copy on write, when configuring copy job.

View full review »
AD
IT Infrastructure Manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dell EMC Unity XT should present a path or a roadmap on how they could put their products on the cloud. This would have some value for their current customers.

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MT
Engineer of IT Operations at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user776910 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Information Technology at a real estate/law firm with 11-50 employees
  • The virtual appliance is limited to 4TB in storage. This should be unlimited for paying customers.
  • The front panel is too fiddly to take off and on.
  • The support model would be better within Australia. Support has been great, but onshore support would be minorly beneficial.
  • Troubleshooting LUN replication can be difficult.
  • When making changes to replicated LUNs (Async in our case), perhaps some measures to prevent us making mistakes. (One of our engineers modified the block storage size and it did not follow the proper procedure, and this broke the replication awkwardly. This was the subject of our most recent support ticket.)
View full review »
it_user555651 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Consultant at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Definitely the biggest requirement is deduplication. The EMC Unity Platform doesn’t have this feature, yet it was a part of the predecessor VNX series. Customers cannot afford to keep duplicates of data on such a tier.

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CK
Head Of IT at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user562692 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have just been to one of the briefing sessions, here at the Dell EMC World 2018 conference, and they released a very cool feature, Snapshot replication, which is very interesting. I'm excited about that.

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it_user866763 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I can't think of any improvements, other than bringing down the price point. That would help.

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it_user865578 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of IT at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

One of the issues we've had is that controllers have crashed several times. Just today I received a message that a dump file was detected. We've had a lot of problems with the storage processor, SPBs. We've actually had them crash. Luckily, nothing went down.

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it_user866088 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Admin at Farm Bureau Health Plans

I haven't found anything that has jumped out at me that they need to improve on. I have been very impressed with how it has gone out, because we use RecoverPoint in our environment and we're 99 percent VMware. Things just seem to show up, with very minimal setup on our side to get it to work.

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it_user798228 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager

Maybe deduplication would be something that would be better to have. Also, it's a fairly new management interface, so work is still being done on that. But compared to other vendors and previous EMC storage, the Unity is really good.

At the moment actually, it does everything it needs to do; I don't have any improvement requests.

View full review »
LL
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
MM
Operations Supervisor at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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

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CA
Helpdesk Supervisor at a logistics company with 501-1,000 employees

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

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it_user866808 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager IT at a financial services firm

I think there are a couple of things on the file side that we're lacking from the VNX world. It would be nice if we got some of those back. I think there are limitations on how many file systems you can back up at a time. Whereas you can do, I believe, eight continuous per data mover on the file side on the VNX, you can only do something like two or four on Unity. If they could step up to that, that would be good.

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it_user286668 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect - Data Center at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

The features they have added have been great, they've greatly simplified it. Bigger, faster. They're always leap-frogging, so the next generation, I'm sure, will have newer processors in it. They have improved leaps and bounds on the interface and ease of use, and I would like to see them keep doing that.

They should have more wizards for customers so they can do more of the self-service types of functions, in terms of upgrades and patching, although it's pretty easy right now.

Also, I would like to see more migration tools. When we're putting the Unity in, I would like to see more capability to migrate from third-party storage platforms, competitive platforms. Migrating from their own platforms is pretty straightforward.

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it_user866097 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at CGSH

There are some features in VNX that I wish were in the Unity. Storage Groups for isolating LANs and hosts. That is a big issue.

We've also encountered an issue when it comes to migrating to compressed LANs on the Unity, and during the Storage vMotion. It appears that the compression algorithm is overwhelmed, and when it becomes overwhelmed it just stops compressing and writes the raw data to the destination. We later copied internally another Storage vMotion to another compressed LAN and achieved much higher compressions on that internal copy. It would be really nice if there was a way to automatically throttle, as a part of a Storage vMotion, to say, "I want to gain the maximum benefits from the compression algorithm, so throttle back the Storage vMotion to implement 100 percent compression."

My colleague has done most of the migration work, but he's also encountered a few other issues in terms of the integration with vCenter. 

It's a box that has a lot of promise, and it was a very shiny new "sports car" when we got it. It has a few dents and scratches in it. That "new car pride," we don't go out and wash it every weekend now. Some of that reality has kicked in. 

I still have expectations, it's an all-flash array, while our VNX, obviously, is not. So we do anticipate, once we've completed the migration and get more experienced with it and maybe with some code upgrades, improvements to some of the attributes, that it will do a good job for us.

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it_user562518 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Implementation Engineer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

The lack of deduplication reduces some of the competitiveness compared to other products. The unity platform does not use data deduplication. This is a data-reduction technology to save space on the array.

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MB
DIrecteur Commerical at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

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.

View full review »
BM
IT at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
  • I would like to see more integration with other products.
  • The interface can be a little challenging for someone new.
View full review »
it_user865572 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Partner at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

All the features that the client has, the client has really enjoyed them.

One thing they could do is lower the price point. There are other storage products that are available from Dell, the SE series for example. The client is comparing the Unity and the SE3000 for example, the SE is cheaper.

View full review »
SC
Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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

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JC
Tech consultant at KMD
  • The user interface could use improvement.
  • They could move away from flash and make it an HTML5 file. 
  • They should update to the cloud.
View full review »
it_user865587 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Among the biggest features that I wanted was deduplication, looking at the zeros coming in, in-line, and those will be available in version 4.3. There is nothing else I can think of at the moment.

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KS
Head of Datacenter Department: at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The price of this product can be more cost-effective.

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LG
Owner at LNETWORK

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

View full review »
RR
Senior Manager at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user866796 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

In the next release, I would like to see stable performance on AIX. AIX are mostly mission-critical systems, so the support has to be there.

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it_user866793 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

I'd like to see more of the NVMe back-end for the flash. And the big deal with the PowerMax is that they've used all U2 drives so that they can avoid having to take it down. I see using M.2 and modular sections as being a real nice alternative that could be implemented in Unity at a fairly low cost.

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it_user866775 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sir Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The code revisions. I think that they could do a better job of testing on the back-end, for the code revisions. I've heard of some issues down the line where people have upgraded to the latest code and there were bugs in it, and they had to release a subsequent code fix. More testing on the Dell EMC side, for when they release those code revisions, would be a good idea.

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AT
Head of IT, South & Central America at a engineering company with 201-500 employees

The price has room for improvement.

View full review »
it_user620604 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Infrastructure Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Increased flexibility in the GUI to provision storage easier
  • Include cloud-based replication for blocks
View full review »
MB
Solution Architect, IT Consultant at Merdasco - Rayan Merdas Data Prosseccing

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.

View full review »
JS
New Technologies Director at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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it_user866784 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

We haven't gotten that deep into it yet to suggest improvements, but based on what we've been seeing here at the Dell EMC World 2018 conference, we'll be looking to make sure CloudIQ is set up for it.

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it_user866094 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage And Virtualization Architect at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see them add Storage Groups, like we have had in Clariions and VNXs. Storage Groups would be a great addition.

View full review »
AD
Systems Engineer at Zenware

I believe this product lacks some things that are extremely valuable for customers, especially VNX customers. The NAS capabilities of Unity - I have to say there are a lot of things I miss. For example, deduplication for hybrid. I have tons of customers with VNX and dedupe. These customers achieve around 50% dedupe efficiency and they mostly use them for archive. If you're talking about 50TB of NAS, which is stored in a 25TB repository, which is very economical, and you can not provide that in a Unity hybrid box, you have problems. That has caused us a lot of problems. 

The other problem I have with the NAS capabilities in Unity is the WORM feature. We were working with a government company that has a public bid and they were buying storage for 13 remote sites. All of them required WORM. Since this is a government customer they took two years or so to establish the project. And they required the WORM feature to securely store records, and they had to be unmodified records. They bought that the idea and they implemented a NAS solution that was going to be consulted by an Oracle Database. They had to buy VMX because Unity didn't have WORM. That would be the most important thing. It's very problematic.

Migrating from VNX to Unity was not so straightforward in the beginning. You could not migrate NAS servers from CIFs. They began with NFS. they recently added CIF support. So, lots of problems there.

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it_user865596 - PeerSpot reviewer
Implementation Engineer at Telindus

The features are nice, but you can't use every feature, because it costs in performance. Therefore, you have to choose which features to use to achieve a better environment. That is why customers do not use every feature in Unity.

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it_user865581 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Admin at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I'm not sure if it has a single pane of glass management console. That would be something we would like to see. Managing as many platforms as we do, as many physical devices as we have, anything that can provide a single pane of glass would be a huge benefit.

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it_user715143 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Specialist at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

All areas, since the entire environment is virtualized. In Brazil, price and native unity migration tools are not very good yet.

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TM
Country Service Delivery Manager at Citrus consulting

An area for improvement is the available capacity. If a customer goes with a base model, which would have its own limit, they could not go beyond the model-supported capacity, so an increase would be good.

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QB
Engineering Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user866772 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see better compression, better dedupe. It's not nearly as good as what is built into the XtremIO. I understand why that is the case, but if they can take some of that technology and leverage that a little bit better in the Unity array, that would be great. That would be the first improvement.

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it_user866079 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT System Admin Lead at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

The reporting, I'm comparing the VNX with Unity. The VNX reporting is much more granular. The information that we need in terms of the IOPS, for example, and things like what my compression value is, that kind of information is pretty straightforward and you can just go to the dashboard and look for the information.

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it_user635478 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Manager Systems at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

To the best of my knowledge, migration from VNX to Unity without VPLEX/RecoverPoint is not available right now. If Dell/EMC will do this, then I would give them a rating of 10/10.

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it_user866082 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Center Architect at Iron Bow Technologies

I don't see a lot of room for improvement. Perhaps if they added more 10GB ports to the back of the system, so you have more IOPS out of the box itself to the network, that would help. But other than that it's a great platform.

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it_user802656 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Storage Architect at a tech services company
  • Improve the interface and provide more management capability.
  • Remove the configuration limits.
  • Start over.
View full review »
it_user779364 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at a financial services firm

There are plenty of areas for improvement. 

They can improve on the speed. 

They can improve on the dedupe features, because right now, if you're using certain functionalities, certain criteria, it doesn't dedupe. It's very limited in one sense, while other vendors dedupe on primary, on critical tier-1 data.

You get support, but sometimes you have to sit there and try to fight through tier-1 just to get to tier-2, to get the correct support, to get particular items corrected. Sometimes it's a battle just to fight through support to get the right people. Most of the time, their first-level support is not very technical, so they tend to give you a page number out of their administration guide, which they call their instruction booklet, and they have you read it. I already have the admin guide. I don't need to read it. I need someone to help me because my system is down. I have a production environment that's very critical.

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it_user756597 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Supervisor

The only improvement would be a lower cost per unit/disks, however on the whole we are very pleased with this product. 

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it_user758244 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a sports company

I’d say better VMware integration. Currently, EMC relies on an additional VM (virtual machine) for integration with vCenter, whereas Nimble interfaces directly without the need of an additional virtual machine.

Both products are fully HTML5 compliant, which makes me very happy. We have been able to fully eliminate Adobe Flash thanks to this.

Firmware Upgrades in EMC Unity require you to manually download OS and Drive firmware, this should be integrated (Nimble does this). When you order an EMC Unity, you have to specify the block size. This is weird for me and even weirder that you cannot change this afterwards, you should be able to specify per LUN/datastore (Nimble does this as well).

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it_user765249 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Center & IT Infrastructure Administrator at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The payment account area.

View full review »
LM
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

It is missing some features, like deduplication.

View full review »
AL
Administrador Almacenamiento-Respaldos at Exito

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

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it_user758250 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager

GUI updates. I had several hours helping support troubleshoot the difference in what the system was doing compared to what the GUI said.

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it_user865575 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Recently, they released products, sometimes without proper testing, it seems. I guess the way the market is going, the way technology is going, they are saying, "Hey, let's get it out there."

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it_user776964 - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Administrator

The reports could possibly export all the data at once.

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it_user760155 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Techinal Engineer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Compression and block deduplication on non-all-flash solutions. I know it should not be easy to reach flash-like compression on mechanical disks, but it would bring this array to the top of the charts. And, of course, the block deduplication in mechanical pools. As I said above, everybody likes the "more space for less money" formula.

View full review »
it_user757434 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Supervisor

For the integration of the VPLEX function for Cross IDC structure, they should integrate the function into the SP controller.

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it_user757431 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT Infrastructure

Thick provisioning of LUNs.

Firmware management form EMC. Strange way to populate firmware based on spread ratio among the customers of EMC Unity.

View full review »
RV
Systems Administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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VS
Tech Lead at Complete Enterprise Solutions

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

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it_user866085 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I can't really think of any improvements for the next release.

The ease of installation, sometimes, for the customers, is not that positive because the customers think they can do it themselves. Sometimes that is a bit of an issue.

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it_user866061 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

At the moment, we are pretty satisfied with it. Perhaps the user interface could be better.

View full review »
it_user760152 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

There is something that comes to mind. We've deployed these systems in a virtualized environment. We are running VMware, and with the VNXe it was possible to restore. We're using Veeam for VMware backups and with the predecessor, it was possible to mount a backup or restore a backup from a storage snapshot. With the Unity 300, this is not possible.

View full review »
it_user762255 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems / Security Administrator with 51-200 employees

I would like the device to have the ability to pull down its own firmware. That would be a great thing.

View full review »
NS
Storage Specialist at a tech company with 51-200 employees

In the management interface, you can only create one LUN at a time. This is resolved in last(s) unity version, DellEMC resolve this…
I also want to see inline deduplication in future Unity versions.


View full review »
it_user793173 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

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. 

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Dell Unity XT
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Dell Unity XT. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.