Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

Dell EMC Unity XT is a storage solution. It is used to store data.

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.

I have been using Dell EMC Unity XT for approximately eight years.

Dell EMC Unity XT is reliable.

The support for Dell EMC Unity XT is great.

We are happy with the way we have Dell EMC Unity XT configured.

The price of Dell EMC Unity XT is not reasonable. They should lower it because the trend is to move to the cloud. They have to protect their market by giving commercial or financial incentives.

My advice to others wanting to implement Dell EMC Unity XT is to start small because it's not commercially viable to maintain large data centers anymore. If you can downsize to the right size and try to offload the data. However, if you have critical applications, then it would require an on-premise solution. The best is still Dell EMC Unity XT.

I rate Dell EMC Unity XT a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is for our data center and hypervisor cluster.

We can get almost real-time response times.

We are just getting ready to leverage Cloud Tier.

Deduplication is the biggest thing for our company.

It is easy to use.

Compression is making a difference towards the amount of hardware that we need to purchase.

We love our snapshots and the CloudIQ function is great.

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.

Our hypervisor cluster has 13 nodes. We have some file level and front-end services.

We leverage the iSCSI and Fibre Channel functionalities for scalability.

Dell EMC technical support is pretty quick.

• The performance
• Ease of use

Before the product went in, we did not have any centralized storage. All our service storage was supported separately. We had multiple machines which added administration and maintenance costs. Whereas now, it is a single source of knowledge and repository for all our data. It has made our lives a lot easier. It also has improved our disaster recovery because we have two of them in place replicating. 

• 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.)

We started using it last November, so going on just about 12 months.

No issues. A very stable product. In previous roles, I have also used the earlier models. The VNX Series and EMC do a really good job. 

No issues. It has been a year, and at the moment, I am having a schedule of work put together to increase the capacity. It will be a very easy job. A matter of adding extra disks to existing slots. Very easy to do. So, a very scalable product.

I have not personally worked with the tech support, but the engineers who installed it have worked with EMC's support. It has been very good. EMC has at times reached out to us, flagging that they have noticed a problem with some of the array configurations. That level of support has been very good. 

No, as there was no central storage solution beforehand. We went to market straight away. 

I got professional services in to do the initial installation. If you get the right people to do the installation, they make it a lot easier.

Pay for the training. At least negotiate with EMC to get the training done, because it is a good product and it is even better once you are shown how to use it properly.

I was debating between the Unity 300 and a NetApp Solution. We ended up picking the Unity only because the administration is a lot easier. 

Also, I had used the earlier model in the past, and it was recommended by the supplier as well. 

It is absolutely a good solution. It does have the ability for expansion into Cloud services, which I would like to use one day, but we have not tried that yet.

• Inline compression
• Auto-shrink
• Data in-place upgrades

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.

We have used it for about six months with multiple deployments during this period.

The operating environment is very stable. I have no complaints and no bugs were noticed so far.

All the models in the series/family have a specific range of scalability. I believe there never was an issue on this, its predecessors, or with the Unity.

SAN is a scale-up technology. Usually when a system needs to be upgraded to handle more workloads or requires to scale up more than the existing systems’ capability, you do not need to do a traditional "fork-lift" upgrade. You do not need to get a bigger SAN and then do the traditional migration from the old SAN to the new one.

You can simply replace the existing storage processors one at a time with a higher model SP and voila, you’re done! Now you’re upgraded from model A to model B with higher scalability and better configurations.

I would give them a rating of "11/10".

I have worked with NetApp, Dell Compellent, Dell EqualLogic, and HPE EVA systems.

• Dell: Too complicated for configuration and management utilization
• NetApp: A very good product when it comes to a file environment. However, they are quite restrictive with their block protocols.
• HPE EVA: Not as reliable as a NetApp or EMC.

The initial setup was simple and straightforward with a friendly interface, wizard driven, and no extra utilities required.

Unity is a good product since all the software required is already bundled.

We previously evaluated Compellent, EqualLogic, MD series, NetApp FAS, Nimble and HPE EVA.

Go for it!

We did a one-month exercise with EMC. We are trying to replace several systems, like NAS and some file shares, put them into one consolidated system. We do have VDI. We're going to re-use it for VDI, so this is the perspective we're trying to evolve toward.

We're replacing legacy hardware and hardware that is going out of support, and we are consolidating two or three systems into one. We also do have some special security requirements that Unity can meet.

The NAS capability is mainly what we're looking for from this product, and being able to recover fast in DR.

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.

We actually haven't tested it yet.

I believe it is scalable.

Dell EMC is actually one of the strategic vendors we work with, so they have quite a big presence at our bank. We meet with them at least once every two weeks.

I believe the setup is going to be straightforward because they have this tool that migrates the data seamlessly, and you don't have any system downtime. I believe it is called Datadobi. It takes out all your data from one system to another and makes it seamless.

Most of the infrastructure we have is from Dell EMC, so we're locked in with Dell but that's fine. If you're happy with the specific product and vendor, why change?

It's a tier-two storage array. The performance is okay.

The all-flash array and the compression ratio are benefiting us. We still have to migrate a couple of systems. We are still in the process of doing it and we'll know better afterward. But, we've seen some good improvements. For example, we put it on one of the file servers and the backup performance improved quite a lot.

It has the same operating system for both file and block, and it actually simplifies everything. It's much smaller compared to VNX.

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.

Stability seems to be good but we had some issues recently because of a bug in the system. We were presenting LANs to the Unity array but I think it caused a disruption to the host. EMC did acknowledge it and provided an alternative way to do it. We felt that this could have been avoided. It caused downtime to the host on two occasions.

Scalability for the 650F is good, but I was expecting a little bit more than that.

Technical support was helpful. I would have appreciated it if it were a lot faster, but we got a resolution for our issue.

We come from VNX, and we also have VMAXs.

When selecting a vendor we look at the 

• performance 
• scalability
• price.

First of all, it should meet the business requirements such as performance, and it should be compatible with all applications. Then we will look at the third factor which is the price.

Regarding advice, it depends on the size of the business. Unity, price per Gig, is actually a good system. In fact, I'm thinking of moving some of the old VMAX arrays to Unity because of the price performance per Gig. If the stability makes sense, then I'm actually going to move it.

Most of our customers buy it for data storage for the ERP that they use in their businesses. Most of them have a preference for the flash model.

All of them are very satisfied with the performance. It's very good equipment. Our customers give us very good feedback about it, they are very satisfied.

It's very easy to manage the whole system. We can put all the virtualized servers in one place, so they can share and manage the devices very easily.

It is very high-speed. The compression is also a very good feature, and the deduplication as well.

No complaints about the stability. Our customers are very happy with it.

Most of our customers are medium-sized businesses. My market, my targets, they don't need high-scale performance. But I know the scalability is very good and you can scale very easily.

The TCO is very good. Our customers invest and they get a good return.

When selecting a vendor, I choose the storage to fit the value and budget that the customer can afford. I can set most of them up with Unity, but sometimes I need to give them something with a lower cost. Sometimes, the price point is a little bit high in our market.

Unity is equipment that, if you sell it, you don't have any headaches with it. It's very good, its performance is very good. We are very satisfied.

We're running virtual machines and we're using the NAS filer for file shares.

It has reduced the latency in application and database reads and writes, which is of benefit to the business.

All-flash, it's fast. We have the 650 model which is all-flash, upgraded from VNX. It just flies.

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

It seems rock solid so far.

At this point, we're at the high end. I don't know that we have a lot of room to scale up, but I think it's going to meet our needs for a while.

My colleague did a firmware upgrade recently and that went well. I would say that was a good experience with tech support.

We were running out of disk space, and there was some latency that we wanted to improve on. We had the VNX previously.

When selecting a vendor, the price is always important, but we need a product that supports our business, It's both those factors.

The setup went relatively well. It was straightforward. We got migrated over quickly, so I have been very pleased with all of it.

It's working well for us so far. We haven't had it long enough to have a full-term answer, but I am very pleased with it so far.

In terms of advice to a colleague, if it's a mid-size company that has a similar needs to ours, I think the Unity is a good option.