Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

For Unity, our use case is mostly test and dev.

Compared to older generations of arrays there is quite an improvement, compared to the older VNXs, for example. It depends on you use it, but for our purposes, we find Unity simple to use.

It's simple, easy to manage.

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

It's more stable than the old generation of arrays. We had a lot of issues with the VNX, for example, but they got better over time. The VNX2 was better, and the Unity has been even more stable.

For our use cases, I believe it will meet our needs moving forward.

Tech support is very good. We haven't had many of serious issues, and the issues we have had have been dealt with very well.

The setup was straightforward. We set most of the configuration ourselves. If you have basic knowledge then it's pretty straightforward.

We did compare it to others at the time, but they have a wide selection of tools and products to meet our use cases. Good support as well.

It's flexible and we've been doing a decentralization exercise for the last number of years, so we've used the Unity 300 for our remote sites as a storage box.

The multiprotocol support. It's supporting NFS, fiber channel, CIFS, and these kinds of things. The multiprotocol is very attractive.

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.

So far it's proven very reliable and very flexible.

So far we have no issues. But we are currently doing disaster recovery tests so we've deployed the Unity 300 with an expansion in our disaster recovery sites. Now we're going to do some serious tests, so we'll be able to tell you that in a few weeks, whether or not it holds its own.

I think I called once, when I deployed the first box myself, to validate whether the setup was correct.

And also with some call-back issues, the ESRS. We had some issues with that, the call-back support. Whenever a box encounters an issue, we automatically contact Dell EMC and log a call automatically. This function has proven somewhat problematic. But it doesn't affect any of the normal day to day operations of it.

As I said, we'd been using its predecessor, the VNXe. It's because the VNXe is being phased out that we switched to the successor, the Unity 300. But apart from that, we've been using EMC solutions for the last four years now. That's why we've stuck with EMC, ever since.

Some points are frustrating. There's no quick setup guides included with the box itself on paper, so you have to connect to EMC support for that. But apart from that, it's very straightforward, quite easy, intuitive. It's proven fairly easy.

As I mentioned before, we've used this product to deploy in remote sites, so as an alternative we were contemplating VMware vSAN. But in the end we didn't choose that option. We chose the shared storage option using the Unity 300.

My experiences are generally positive with this product. I would definitely recommend to others to go for it unless they choose an alternative.

The VNX5300 was a good all-around device, which we used for our VMware-based workloads along with CIFS-based file access. After our transition to HCI, we needed a dedicated, non-virtual machine-based CIFS solution that was easily scalable to fit our needs. The Unity 300 fit that and has not caused any issues since being in production.

We currently deploy the Unitys for CIFS-based file access to supplement our VxRail deployment, which was installed around the same time.

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

We have had no stability issues with the product, including when adding replication on the fly, customer installed code updates, and customer installed DAEs.

We have had no issues of scalability with the product. The product has been upgraded with additional drives and enclosures multiple times without incident.

• Stability
• Simplicity
• Speed

I’m a Dell/EMC partner, not a customer. In my all installations, customers were very satisfied. Unity has shown improvements over VNX.

For example, the graphic management has become HTML5, and the datamover(s) and control station(s) are not physical. They support VVOL.

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.

I have used the product for six months.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Overall, it is very good.

I´m a Dell/EMC partner, not a customer.

The initial setup was very simple.

Read a little bit about the product and its purpose. The implementation itself is simple.

We use this solution for our databases. We also use some of the applications provided. 

It is a hassle-free storage environment that helps us manage our hardware. The upgrades are helpful and it makes our organization a more productive environment. 

We like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. The new features of going off the grid and replicating really help us. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources. 

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. 

It is stable. 

It can easily scale up to meet our requirements. 

We have had good experiences with tech support. 

We used VNX previously and although it was fast, the performance was poor.