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Dell Unity XT pros and cons

Vendor: Dell Technologies

4.2 out of 5

198 reviews
96% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Dell Unity XT offers unified block and file storage with superior all-flash performance that simplifies administration. Integration with VMware enhances virtual environment management, while Dynamic Pools allow easy scalability. Despite its advanced features, Dell Unity XT lacks deduplication and compression, has limited cloud replication, and scalability issues. High pricing concerns exist, making it potentially costly for medium-sized companies. Former popular VNX features are missing, impacting its competitiveness in data protection and availability.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Unified block and file storage simplifies administration and deployment while reducing rack space.

Integration with VMware enhances performance and ease of management for virtual environments.

All-flash performance offers superior speed and efficiency, with reduced overhead and tiering.

Dynamic Pools enable easy scalability by allowing disks to be added incrementally.

Replication and disaster recovery features provide robust data protection and high availability.

CONS

Dell Unity XT lacks deduplication and compression features in its current version, affecting hybrid platforms and overall efficiency.

Cloud-based replication capabilities are limited, with current replication technology requiring improvement for enhanced integration with systems like VMware.

Several features from previous models, such as VNX, like Storage Groups, Secure Mobile Connectivity, and more granular reporting, have not been retained or improved upon.

Scalability issues are present, with limitations in data-in-place conversion and insufficient IOPS support from its architecture.

Pricing remains a concern, as Dell Unity XT is considered expensive, especially for medium-sized companies, with high costs associated with purchasing and maintenance contracts.

Dell Unity XT Pros review quotes

NS

Storage Specialist at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Nov 28, 2016

In my all installations, customers were very satisfied.

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

Nov 30, 2016

Fully automated storage tiering (FAST) cache capabilities allows some FLASH drives to be used to improve the overall performance and reduce the cost of the array versus an all flash or old style spinning disk array.

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Technology Consultant at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 8, 2016

The operating environment is very stable.

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Free Report: Dell Unity XT Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Dell Unity XT. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.

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Director of Infrastructure Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 5, 2017

Unified block and file storage without the need of control stations and data movers. This simplifies administration and deployment and requires less rack space.

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RS

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

Mar 15, 2017

It has a very intuitive web console that runs in HTML5 and makes navigation and administration fairly easy.

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Infrastructure Manager at a hospitality company

Mar 16, 2017

We have seen a huge performance increase due to all-flash that is beyond what was anticipated.

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

Mar 27, 2017

Pricing is relatively good compared to other vendors with the same specifications.

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

Mar 29, 2017

I like the easy management with the new Unisphere management and the HTML5 interface.

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Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

May 3, 2017

Replication of the communication object (COB) scenarios

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

Aug 7, 2017

The implementation went smoothly.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 177)

Dell Unity XT Cons review quotes

NS

Storage Specialist at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Nov 28, 2016

In the management interface, you can only create one LUN at a time.

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

Nov 30, 2016

The lack of deduplication reduces some of the competitiveness compared to other products.

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Technology Consultant at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 8, 2016

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.

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Free Report: Dell Unity XT Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Dell Unity XT. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.

885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Director of Infrastructure Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 5, 2017

Include cloud-based replication for blocks

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RS

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

Mar 15, 2017

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

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Infrastructure Manager at a hospitality company

Mar 16, 2017

The only room for improvement I can see would be a faster lead time and lower cost.

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

Mar 27, 2017

To the best of my knowledge, migration from VNX to Unity without VPLEX/RecoverPoint is not available right now.

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

Mar 29, 2017

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

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Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

May 3, 2017

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

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

Aug 7, 2017

In Brazil, price and native Unity migration tools are not very good yet.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 177)

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