Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

Dell Unity XT is used for data storage at a data center.

Dell Unity XT has improved our organization's performance. We have seen reduced management times.

The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is data duplication. Additionally, the management interface is simple, and is not a hassle using it. You don't need too much to learn or to be familiarized with it.

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.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for approximately two years.

Dell Unity XT is a very stable and reliable solution. We can leave the solution alone for a month without needing to check on how the unit is operating, or if there are problems. We realized the benefit of using the solution in approximately one year of use.

The scalability of Dell Unity XT is good because during the period of one year we noticed we had the need to add more and more systems, and more components to it and we were able to do it with no hassle. We do not plan to increase our usage.

We have approximately 500 endpoints using this solution.

The support from Dell Unity XT is good. They actively monitor the units. They have called us up when they have lost connection to one of the units to then take action. We have not had any issues to have needed to contact the support directly.

I rate the support of Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

Positive

I was previously using HP High-Performance Unit Storages. There was a need to purchase a new unit because we were struggling with the resources, performance, support, and other aspects. The best solution that was on offer that came to us was Dell Unity XT. The company decided to move to it and buy the full flash version to support all the applications that we have on-site.

The initial setup of Dell Unity XT was straightforward because we had Dell representatives involved with our team. 

We had to do a migration because we wanted to ensure that there was no downtime during the migration process from the old solution to the Dell Unity XT.  To complete everything live without the business noticing that something is going on in the background. 

You cannot have two groups of equipment that are deployed at the same time. For example, the host, storage, and switches. We had to ensure that everything is deployed, updated, and then do the connections between the two solutions and start with the migrations.

We use Dell representatives for the implementation of the solution. We ended up doing the configurations ourselves without needing the support. 80 percent of the deployment we did ourselves. We had two people involved in the deployment and the solution has not required any maintenance so far.

We deployed not only the one Dell Unity XT but a bunch of them. It took us approximately one week for everything to be finished. Additionally, we deployed some hosts, switches, and other systems.

We have received a return on investment using Dell Unity XT.

We were able to solve the performance issues we were having. Our core communications and infrastructure is dependent on these units. The fact that all of the systems that we have improved significantly in terms of performance. The organization has benefited or is happy with the investment they've done at this point.

We have received a full return on investment from using the solution for three to four years.

The price of Dell Unity XT is reasonable. However, if you are buying a custom solution, it can come at a considerable price. 

If you want to scale or add additional components, this is where the price starts to spike or become very complicated and expensive. If you purchase the components separately they can cost a lot.

We did not evaluate other solutions before choosing Dell Unity XT.

My advice to others would be for them to purchase the solution urgently if they need a backup solution.

I rate Dell Unity XT a ten out of ten.

We are a hospital with many business applications running in-house, as well as File Server Business Apps, which is why we need a three-tier architecture for NAS and storage.

The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it's a single block, a complete block that includes both NAS and SAN. This was our ultimate requirement because we do a lot of file sharing.

When compared to other solutions, particularly HP, they lack the complete block.

The complete block and file sharing are the most usable features.

The features we need are already included.

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

We have 600 to 800 users.

This solution is extensively used; it's a hospital, and we use it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

I would rate technical support a four out of five. Technical support is good.

Positive

We have already found a solution. We have already purchased the solution from Dell EMC. Not the usual traditional HCI, we used the standard traditional one instead of HCI because our environment is more compatible with the previous set.

I've previously used the VNX, this one is superior to the VNX. And, in particular, the NAS file sharing feature. It's easier than before when compared to the other one.

The HP does not have the complete block. They have their own SAN, which is not in a single block. We cannot configure everything from a single, interface.

Multiple blocks are required in the HP one to control and monitor everything.

Because we previously used Dell EMC VNX 5600, the initial setup is very simple.

It is easier for us to move ahead with the same company.

I maintain this solution, it only requires one person.

The initial setup was handled by an integrator, and the rest of the migration was completed by myself.

It's extremely competitive. We checked both HP and Dell and we determined that Dell EMC was a better option.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis.

I don't recall the amount because that part, the financial part, is handled by the finance team. We are not aware of this, we are technical evaluators.

Definitely. This is something I would recommend to others who are interested in using this solution. Many people are unaware that HP does not have the entire block, despite the fact that HP's technical team claims to have it. Specifically, companies looking for NAS and SAN both together should consider Dell EMC over HP, because HP has a separate nest server as a separate server that they are providing you. However, they mention that the NAS is also available there, but it is on a separate server.

I would rate Dell EMC Unity XT an eight out of ten.

I work as an integrator and this is one of the products that I have implemented in different locations. Most customers choose this product because they want to have faster storage. The XT series is all-flash, so it's fast.

I recommend it for ERP systems and for people running Oracle Database. I have implemented both of these. Most applications these days are implemented in a VM environment with a Hypervisor, and this product is well suited for virtualization.

The setup and installation procedures are easy.

The management is done using a single console, which is good. You don't have to use a separate VM to manage the storage.

The most valuable feature of Dell storage systems is the tiering. However, with an all-flash system, there is no tiering.

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.

I have been working with the Dell EMC Unity XT series for three years.

Unity had a lot of trouble with stability in the beginning, but it is stable now.

This is a scalable product. I have set up the device in a lot of different locations.

The Unity technical support is very good.

I have also implemented Dell EMC PowerStore and Unity is better. The PowerStore had a lot of issues when I deployed it.

I also work with HPE 3PAR and I find that it has better monitoring capabilities, a better GUI, and better reporting. Reports with different views can be exported. In Dell products, the reporting is not as good

With 3PAR, there is another appliance required to operate the storage but with Dell, it's good because you can manage it from the same console. You don't need another VM to manage the storage.

The initial setup is very easy to do and there are no prerequisites.

Installing the license is easy. You just have to download it from the portal.

Upgrading the product is also easy to do.

This is a great storage solution and a product that I recommend. That said, it's not perfect. More can be done from Dell to improve the Unity series.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for user shares and VMs.

We have 200 people using it in our organization.

The snapshotting is slick.

I like how it separates the iSCSI drives from the standard shares. It has two different routes to it. I know most of the other solutions do this, but I just like the way that Dell EMC does it.

I like the dashboard, which gives me a quick reference on my monitor as to what is using what bandwidth.

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

Our solution is four- to five-years-old. We use it every day.

I have never had any stability issues. It has been solid and stable. The dual platform, i.e., how it sits one head on top of the other, has been rock-solid. I have never had an issue with it.

I have noticed there is another version that has come out.

I haven't scaled it yet. The way that I set it up was half the drive bays are being used. When I do need to scale up, I am just going to duplicate the other half of the drives, stick them in there, and then spin them up.

The technical support is good and quick.

I would like a little faster response, but I don't think that their response is really that slow. They respond fairly quickly, at least fast enough for most issues. If it was an emergency issue, it might be different, as they probably would move it up the ladder anyway.

It is a little bit of a pain at first to set up the snapshotting. However, once it is set up, and you figure it out, it is not that bad.

I needed one of the specialists to set it up initially, which is not surprising because the solutions are a pain in that way. Some of the menus, and how it is at first, are a little awkward. It takes a little while to get used to, then it all starts to make sense.

I liked the price point when we purchased it.

I don't know what other units have that Unity doesn't have. Though I would say to them, "Keep up with your competition."

Look at it online. If you can get a demo version in-house, give it a shot.

If you need to keep data safe and make sure it doesn't go anywhere, Dell EMC Unity is a good way to go.

I would rate them as nine out of 10.

We use it as block storage for a couple sites. 

The performance is fine for what it does. It is flash and spinning media.

For sites that we use it on, it gives us more flexibility and high availability solutions. It is easier to expand the site, if needed.

It is simple to use and easy to manage. We don't touch it after we set it up. It is not something you constantly have to go in everyday and tweak, which makes it beneficial.

• Ease of use: The GUI management is very easy to use.
• The management is easy for us. We rarely touch it now. It just runs.

I would like the UI to look better.

Stability is very good. It has been running for over a year now without problems. We haven't had any dropped layers.

The growth is difficult to forecast, but it's easy for the unit to grow when needed. It is very scalable.

The technical support does alright.

We didn't have a solution in place for the size that we needed to have a high availability solution. Dell EMC is our preferred storage provider, so we went out and worked with them to get a solution where we have a cluster environment to VMware and a failover with the other node along with shared storage.

The initial setup was very straightforward. This was not our first SAN array, so I just racked and stacked it, and they gave us the IPs and turned it over to us. 

The purchasing has been simple. When you do need storage, you spec it out. Then, you receive a quote back and make a decision from there. 

The last purchase was in China, so I was more on the config, less on the purchase side.

The solution should be cheaper.

We evaluated NetApp. We decided on Dell EMC because we are more familiar with them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Price.

• Fiber channel connectivity
• Fast cache features
• Support of VVOLS
• 10GB NICs
• Support of high performance and rapid provisioning/expansion options
• Deployment time is quick from unboxing to setup
• Scalable
• Supports both small environments and larger deployments
• Supports hosts connected via fiber channel directly to the unit without the need for fabric switches

Unity 300 is now the go-to storage device we use as we virtualize our infrastructure.

The SAN currently exceeds our requirements in terms of performance. We have estimated for 30% growth per year for three years. The configuration purchased had storage capacity and performance to match these requirements.

EMC provided a slightly alternative solution using all-flash negating all disk I/O, latency, and contention issues. We have seen a huge performance increase due to all-flash that is beyond what was anticipated. In three years, when the storage is close to its limits capacity-wise, performance will be greater than necessary.

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.

I have used EMC Unity since June, 2016.

We have not had any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability problems.

Technical support is excellent. They have rapid response teams, ESRs, and the EMC account managers are always available.

We had no previous SAN solution.

The initial setup was very simple and instructions were provided in both documents and video tutorials.

Licensing ranges from $20K plus for a decent configuration. AFA configurations start at about $25K.

We looked at multiple vendors including NetApp, HPE, IBM, and Nimble.

There is currently a long lead time on 3TB SSD disks due to a shortage of materials in the USA.

We were able to consolidate from multiple types of disks into a single group of disks of the same speed. Now, we do not have to worry about preparing pools of disks for each server application. Instead, they are all using the same disks but getting a faster response due to the nature of the solid-state drives.

I like the fact that you can use a solid-state array (all-flash array) for your servers. It has a very intuitive web console that runs in HTML5 and makes navigation and administration fairly easy.

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

The previous version to 4.1.0 caused the array to stop responding during the code upgrade.

We have had no scalability issues so far.

The merger between Dell and EMC caused some issues with support tickets not getting assigned properly. The last few months the support has improved.

Although, we cannot compare them one to one, we were using Celerra NS-480 and now we are using EMC Unity. The main reason, we switched platforms was due to EMC end-of-life support for the Celerra NS-480 as December 31, 2016.

The initial configuration was quick since we took time to prepare the project plan that states what we need to start the installation. We had some challenges when connecting the ESRS gateways to monitor and manage these arrays.

This unit is one of the cheapest storage all-flash arrays in the market and it does well for what it is intended. It can be combined for both file and block storage.

I looked into EMC VNX, NetApp, Isilon, Qumulo, Pure Storage, Nimble Storage, and Tegile.

Learn about the product and its capabilities. If you are unsure whether this will handle your workload, my suggestion is to get a proof-of-concept with your preferred value added reseller. Move some workload to it and test the performance. There is nothing worse than buying a unit that won’t perform as you expect it.

Unity is utilized primarily for our vSphere/vCenter environment. It is where we keep all of our data stores and all of our LUNs and anything to do with our vSphere environment. We really don't usually assign any LUNs directly to servers.

We have a large cluster environment and these are active clusters. There are times where the SQL cluster environment starts to get full and it's really easy to add a LUN or space without interruption. The customer is not even aware that the volume is about to run out of space. We can always just add more space and do data recovery for DRs without the customer's knowledge.

One of the features that I find most valuable is that it is easy to access. We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity.

The solution has been around in our environment for about five years. I've only been exposed to it for the past year and a half.

My impression of the stability is all positive.

We can always add more storage or more devices or more disks. There's always room for growth and it's easy to implement.

This is our primary source of storage and we plan to increase our usage. There's an objective coming in 2022 to increase storage. We have several terabytes and we are constantly chewing that up so there is an effort underway to expand.

I would like it to be a little bit easier to contact support. We can contact support, but we have to go through a phone tree. We get routed to different places. I might call support to say that I need a drive replaced and get transferred to three different groups before I get to the group I actually need.

Once we are able to get in touch with someone, and we have an engineer working with us, it's great the way they follow up. They constantly keep in touch with us whenever we have issues. They help schedule any type of upgrades and get them implemented. Overall, support has been very helpful.

And anytime there are notices of updates and upgrades, support keeps us involved and engaged.

Positive

We went to the Unity because of cost. I wasn't involved in the purchase of it, but the VPLEX maintenance was getting costly and it felt like the Unity was newer technology. The technology was better, the interface was better, interacting with it was better. It is a lot easier to use than the VPLEX. We figured it was a better solution than what we had and one that gave us more flexibility

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to set up.

Ours was a pretty large deployment. The Unity replaced our VPLEX environment so when we put the Unity in we had to do a lot of migration conversion from VPLEX to Unity. That was a process because we had a lot of VMs and data stores move. It took us about a day and a half to do everything.

We have five engineers who work on it, or who actually touch it or provide hands-on support for it. As far as the end-users go, we have about 500, and they have no idea they're on a Unity. What they know is that when they pull their machines up, they have storage and data.

We used CDW. Our experience with them was outstanding. They're great. I have no issues at all. CDW just did an outstanding job.

The return on investment is in the fact that it meets all of our storage needs and in the ease of expanding it. It's also seen through the fact that we can work on the environment without interruption to the end-user.

Do your due diligence. Check it out to see if Unity is something you can use for your environment. It is definitely worth looking into. Give it a try.

As far as the solution's functionality goes, I see no areas in need of improvement. Everything is functioning completely adequately. I have no complaints and no issues. I have no negative feedback. The implementation was easy and straightforward. Doing our recovery points is pretty straightforward. It is easy to access through a browser. We can add and remove LUNs on-the-fly with no impact at all to our environment.