Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

Name: Dell Unity XT
Brand: Dell Technologies
Rating: 4 (48 reviews)

Vendor: Dell Technologies

4.2 out of 5

48 reviews

2,777 followers

Post review

What is Dell Unity XT?UNIXBusinessApplication
Price:

Dell EMC Unity XT is one of the best all-flash storage arrays on the market today. Dell EMC Unity XT arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built for a multi-cloud world. In addition, they support digital transformation, enabling businesses to reach the full potential of their data capital quickly and easily. Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms provide the performance, efficiency, enterprise-class software, and virtualization integrations required for running a wide range of virtualized applications.

Get the Dell Unity XT Buyer's Guide and find out what your peers are saying about Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF and more!

Helped 735,226 peers since 2012

Featured reviews

Srikanth Purushothaman

DIRECTOR at Vellore Online Systems

Dec 23, 2022

The initial setup is very straightforward. Even upgrading the firmware is very nice. You don't need to shut down. Previously, we used to have a shutdown, and now we hand over to one more processor, upgrade the one processor, and then switch back to this process, and then we'll do the upgrade for the process so there is no downtime. I'd rate the ease of implementation nine out of ten. Since we are holding almost all the data, which are all critical and confidential, the deployment is always on-prem only. It takes a maximum of two to three hours. The solution is almost finalized before ordering. We plan what has to be done, and how many services have to be connected through the HBA. Based on that, the number of fiber ports should have been ordered along with the system. Normally, it comes with two fiber-channel HBA adapters. We used to order with four channels instead of going for a sand switch. We connect three servers directly into process A and process B. Before getting into the server, all the servers should be up and running with the HBA connector with the fiber cable ready. Once we install the server, we will see if the firmware is up-to-date or if it is one month old since the shipment takes at least one or two months before it reaches our hands. If there is any new update, we will check with them to see whether the new firmware is good or if there are any bugs in it. If the support team says there is no bug, it means we will update the firmware and create a pool. If it is a hybrid pool, we'll do a mix and combinations of flash as well as the NSS for the images. For the data, we have only the flash itself, and we use a rate six for the data. Previously, with the regular SaaS drives, we used to have a rate ten; however, with the flash drives, we used to have rate five or rate six only. Normally, in-house inside the rack, we need two people. Otherwise, one engineer itself will do. If it is a flash drive, only one person itself will be enough. If it is three bay drives with 144 TB or 288 TB, then we'll go for one more person to fix inside the rack. Once it is fixed, the installation will be done only by one person. For maintenance, normally, we check the firmware updates within a month, or we check every 30 to 45 days to seek out firmware updates. We provide maintenance to our customers. For other issues, we might call technical support. Most things we can manage.

Read full review

Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jan 16, 2023

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.

Read full review

abstract

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

Jan 3, 2022

This is a newer model for us. Out of the three projects that I have worked on, two of them are using the older model and the XT is primarily in another project. We have tons of scalability in it. We have a whole rack dedicated to Unity, and it is pretty much empty. We have probably close to a petabyte of storage in there, and it is still pretty much empty. Scalability looks really good. Where we would run into a scalability problem, we are going to do a lot of image storage, and that doesn't compress well. So, flash drives wouldn't really help us. We need a big, scalable object storage system. That is where Isilon comes in. We have about three and a half petabytes of Isilon at each of that project's sites.

Read full review

Pricing

"The price is good for commercial grade storage 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."
"Licensing is easy since all the software is included."

Valuable Features

"Unified block and file storage without the need of control stations and data movers. This simplifies administration and deployment and requires less rack space."
"It has a very intuitive web console that runs in HTML5 and makes navigation and administration fairly easy."
"I like the easy management with the new Unisphere management and the HTML5 interface."

Room For Improvement

"Include cloud-based replication for blocks"
"This product lacks deduplication and compression at the current version 4.1.0. LACP is not available for iSCSI either."
"The storage processors have less port expansion than previous high-end VNX arrays. Data compression is only available in all-flash pools."

Pricing

"The price is good for commercial grade storage 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."
"Licensing is easy since all the software is included."

Valuable Features

"Unified block and file storage without the need of control stations and data movers. This simplifies administration and deployment and requires less rack space."
"It has a very intuitive web console that runs in HTML5 and makes navigation and administration fairly easy."
"I like the easy management with the new Unisphere management and the HTML5 interface."

Room For Improvement

"Include cloud-based replication for blocks"
"This product lacks deduplication and compression at the current version 4.1.0. LACP is not available for iSCSI either."
"The storage processors have less port expansion than previous high-end VNX arrays. Data compression is only available in all-flash pools."

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our Dell Unity XT Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Learn more about Dell Unity XT

Dell EMC Unity XT Features

Dell EMC Unity XT has many valuable key features, including:

Unified storage flexibility: With Dell EMC Unity XT you can consolidate separate storage platforms into a single Unity XT unified storage system via a simple and intuitive (HTML5) management GUI that also connects you to CloudIQ.
All-inclusive data protection: Dell EMC Unity XT offers a reliable way to protect application data with all-inclusive data protection services, including snapshots, data-at-rest drive encryption, replication, thin clones, and dynamic pools.
Software-defined solutions: Dell EMC Unity XT provides software-defined storage and HA for on-prem and in the cloud solutions.
Multi-cloud alignment: With Dell EMC Unity XT you have the ability to build and manage an effective data-first multi-cloud strategy. It allows you to consolidate public and private cloud resources that align with your business goals.
Metro node: This feature enables automated business continuity with zero RPO and RTO. It also provides greater flexibility through multi-platform support and replication to any array and has zero performance impact on the storage array.
Scalable file system: Dell EMC Unity XT is built with a robust 256TBu file system. The UFS64 file system includes up to 256 independent VMDK clones, 16 thin clones, space efficient snapshots with a simple space reclaim and low IO impact, file system shrink that can reclaim free blocks, simplified Quotas for User, and much more.
DevOps integrations: Dell EMC Unity XT supports the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin to run Kubernetes workloads.

Dell EMC Unity XT Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC Unity XT include:

High-speed data access
Low latency
Dual-active controller architecture
Multi-cloud
Intuitive user interface
Cost efficient
Solid performance

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC Unity XT users.

A Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company says, "It is definitely one of the most robust, solid, well-performing products that I have dealt with. It is set it and forget it, which is pretty amazing." He also mentions, “We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device.”

Peter S., Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company, states, “The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs. This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.”

PeerSpot user Melvin T., Senior Systems Engineer at Prosperity Bank, explains that the solution is “easy to use and we can add LUNs or space without interruption to end-users. 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."

Dell Unity XT was previously known as EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity.

Dell Unity XT is the #2 ranked solution in best All-Flash Storage Arrays. PeerSpot users give Dell Unity XT an average rating of 8.4 out of 10. Dell Unity XT is most commonly compared to Dell PowerStore: Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerStore. Dell Unity XT is popular among the midsize enterprise segment, accounting for 67% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a educational organization, accounting for 62% of all views.