Dell Unity XT Reviews

We currently have three Dell EMC Unity XT units, all used for different applications.

The primary use case is general, all-around storage. We use it for both unstructured file and unstructured block storage and a lot of it is attached through a few systems to VMware.

The applications are databases and other similar products.

One of the units is used for diagnostic imaging, and another is used for file services such as the Hospital Management System (HMS).

I don't have metrics but this product benefits us because of its reliability. It's like a black box that sits in the background and just runs. It works great and does everything that's asked of it.

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.

It could be a little easier to attach it to a network file system.

I have been working with Dell EMC Unity XT for approximately four years. It has been at the company for five years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We haven't really had to scale it too much. Whatever we've had to do, it's been able to accommodate what we need. We know that it can grow more but we just don't need it to. Also, we're shifting away from it because it's being replaced.

Dell's technical support is great for 99% of things.

There have been a few problems but I understand because the product was not mainstream. The unit was an FS8600 and there were only about 12 people in all of North America who knew it well. That's why we got rid of it.

Overall, I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten. I don't give anybody a ten because there is always room for improvement.

The organization did not have a previous solution. The original two devices were brought in specifically for the tasks that they perform. The third one is dedicated to the new HSM software.

We have other storage, on-premises. We have different storage for different things. For example, we have two Dell Compellent units, as well as Isilon. We run the gamut of everything.

We are retiring two of our Unity XT units because we bought a Dell EMC PowerStore. We're updating everything as part of our refresh cycle. We will be keeping the last Unity XT for at least two more years because it's a fairly new system. It will probably be replaced by a PowerStore as well.

I was not with the company when it was initially set up but I have set up other ones. This product is straightforward and easy to set up. It is almost set-and-forget, where you get it on the floor and away you go.

It took me less than a day to deploy, from unboxing to putting it on the raised floor to powering it on and having my first system attached to it.

I deployed it myself. I have been working with storage products for more than 20 years.

It is myself and two others that are responsible for the maintenance. All of us are backup and storage engineers. I am the primary and the other two are my backups. We all take different approaches and handle different things.

For purchases, we have always dealt with Dell through a third party because until recently, Dell did not do direct sales. The company we used was Techni-Core and they're okay. We've had some issues with them including some improperly configured Isilons and other systems that were not done correctly. Back when I first joined, I had to go in and spend four months debugging a system that was set up wrong.

I think that they had a couple of people that were poor at doing installs but I'm pretty sure they are now gone because I don't see their names anywhere.

We see a return on investment because this product just runs. We don't have to spend hours maintaining it. It needs less intervention from us which means that we can spend time on other things.

This solution is a good price for what you get.

We are a Dell customer so we did not evaluate options from other vendors.

Everything that we have is Dell unless it is something that is vendor-issued or vendor-specific.

We only touch the edge of what this product can do. It can do more than we use it for, such as file replication between two units.

There is not much needed in terms of improvement. It is a rock-solid product.

My advice for anybody who is considering the Dell Unity XT is to just enjoy it. It's a great system that is easy to maintain. Right out of the box, it's a good system. It's not the best that I've ever used but it's pretty close.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

We are running 3,000 VMs spread out over five such units.

The initial Unity x50 series, even all-flash, were quickly driving the CPU to near 100% on as little as 180TB, having data reduction on all volumes in place.

The XT came in support and sizes better on our infra, due to more CPU power. The system doesn't seem to have a module to offload datareduction, but in the end does a great job in getting the datareduction come round at higher capacity without oversubscribing the CPU (%). In the end the SDD media cost more then the array/storage processors. So basically you want to datareduce as much as the system can take.

Good in-built monitoring tools from the System|Performance section Tab, from CloudIQ you can reach out to vCenter as well. ESRS (Call Home) on the service delivery part is valuable.

Remote Code update support (interactive or not) is free of charge , as you wish, nonetheless you are free to do it yourself as update are cumulative and retained on each new codelevel.

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 membering 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 volumegroups , nor hostgroups. A feature that any solution I worked with so far has. Its a burden to assure each host has the same LUN ID on each host in this manner. As of the june 2021 releae , code OE 5.1 it seems to offer the option to have hostgroups in the end !

The integration with vCenter comes with a sideeffect, in that it will take control of the vSphere scan process, moreover every esx host is scanned multiple times. It takes easiliy a few hours to add a few LUNS to a few hosts. Rather Painfull. Even when adding LUNs using the unisphere GUI , you can keep up with the pace of your script.

Support Responsiveness & time to fix bugs should be improved. Over the past 1,5 yrs we had occassional controller reboots and we went all the way from OE 4.5 over 5.02 to 5.03 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 rewritting and the problem will be fixed in the next major code release (OE 6.x) . We are now a year later, still no fix, but furtunately faced the considition once on one out of 5 arrays during that year. 

I have been using Unity (XT) for 15 months.

OE 5.03 is a rather mature & stable code, without to say that it will addresse all. Some bugs are stress/load triggered and rather exceptional but might be easily recurring if the same conditions are remet.

The XT scales better then its predecessor. 

Not the most responsive support, we have a Service Account Manager and reporting in place now and keep the pressure to get answers. Very bad post bug/incident follow up.

The system is easy to install and you might be able to do it on your own on the 2nd attempt.

Ease of use, Price Quality, vSphere Integration, CloudIQ (Performance data) , ESRS (Call Home) and though not used as such , Support for Block Devices, Cifs,NFS

The setup is rather straighforward.

I have compared Unity x00/x50f versus Unity XT x80f. 

Midrange solution for SMB up till Large Entreprises too if you spread the load on many units.

We are using Dell EMC Unity XT for our Oracle EBS on-premise ERP solution for storage. Primarily, for our database needs. We are quite happy with the performance of our SQL Server. 70% of OLTP and 30% reporting is the workload on that particular storage.

The solution overall has high performance.

Dell EMC Unity XT improvement point should be in the area of enhancements or innovation. It would be a benefit to have some kind of intelligence built into the solution with respect to the workload of their firmware. For example, if Dell EMC Unity XT is running an Oracle load or SQL application, we have to do other functions on it, find self remedies, or find self alerts to allow the administrator of the database to good insight into what exactly is happening in the storage layer. We are using different tools to retrieve partial information from the storage.

Having more artificial intelligence tools built into the solution would be a great benefit. This would allow us to see more about the workloads and higher visibility, such as performance degradation. 

I have been using Dell EMC Unity XT for approximately 20 years.

The Dell EMC Unity XT 450F is in production in our organization for the last three years, we have not faced any problems. The new version has been quite stable.

We are quite happy with the performance. The workload we are receiving on this storage solution is 70% for OLTP and 30% for reporting.

We have found the solution to be very scalable. We are in the process of receiving more enclosures that to increase the storage capacity.

We have approximately 1,500 users across the country that are using Dell EMC Unity XT and an additional 200 indirect users using it.

The technical support team from Dell EMC Unity XT has a proactive approach. We don't need to worry about what is going wrong we have them to support us. We have not to need to contact them frequently. They contact us in case of any alert that comes.

We have not used a solution previously.

The installation of Dell EMC Unity XT is not difficult. You only need to do the rack mounting and plug it into the environment. However, configuring it for the application is quite tedious because it doesn't have any built-in templates for different workloads. Installation is plain and the solution is not a challenge but configuring it for the workload is the challenge.

The time it took for the implementation to have the solution to a level we can use for production was approximately 48 hours.

We had support to do the implementation, we did not do it ourselves. We had a couple of engineers from Dell do the implementation and we managed the solution using our onsite team.

There is not a license required for the use of the solution. We purchased a maintenance contract.

We did a thorough evaluation of other solutions and it was clear after the performance evaluation, Dell EMC Unity XT was the best choice. We did a migration of Oracle Storage to different storage. There are other commercial advantages with Dell.

I would highly recommend Dell EMC Unity XT to others. I have experience with several sorts of workloads.

I rate Dell EMC Unity XT a nine 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.

We can use Dell EMC Unity XT for backing up SAN and NAS drives. Mainly for databases and for file servers.

The most valuable feature is the dynamic cache of this product. It is very important. We have the physical cache and we can boost this cache using disks. All the products are mainly flash now and this is one of the main characteristics which our customers like.

I have a problem because between the Unity XT and the PowerMax, sometimes we need another product between these two products. There could be better integrated and the capacity of the size could be larger.

In the future, if NVMe disc could be used on the Dell EMC Unity XT it would be beneficial.

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

Dell EMC Unity XT is very reliable.  I used to use legacy EMC products, such as VNX. This product has a long story.

The solution is suitable for Medium-sized companies. When you talk large, it's relative. Our customers here in Algeria are the largest here but they are only medium-sized compared to other countries.

The technical support is good. Opening the ticket, the management of the ticket is good. However, when we have to use or change parts, it can be more difficult because of the customs rules of the disposability and availability of the parts. We have problems delivering them in the time the parts are needed in some cases.

We previously used Fujitsu and IBM products.

When comparing Dell and IBM they are very similar. Fujitsu is a good product too. However, when comparing them all in their strengths for implementation, the lifecycle of the product, and the support they provide, I would rank Dell number one, IBM second, and third would be Fujitsu.

The initial setup is simple. The time it takes for the implementation depends. From scratch, a new implementation takes approximately three days. If you have to migrate a node storage array, the time can increase, I am not able to give an exact time because it depends on the volume and the nature of the data. We can take one week to three weeks to migrate. However, generally, it takes approximately 10 days when we have to migrate and without migration, it's about two and three days.

We provide implementation service to our customers.

The maintenance is done by the Dell representative in our country.

The solution is very expensive. 

There are a lot of advantages with EMC Unity XT, there's no limitation. When you bought the product, the software is included and there's no limitation of the terabyte in the licenses.

I would firmly recommend this solution to others.

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

We use Unity solutions for our data center operations as a primary storage environment.

We were able to retire all our VNX systems and reduce the footprint in the data center. The Unity systems can scale up quickly, so we use less space in the data center if we employ more Unity systems than the old VNX systems.

Unity is scalable and you can configure it quickly. 

One area of improvement is replication. We are also using Oracle virtual machines, and when you are using systems from other vendors, the process of replicating from Unity through OLVM is more laborious than when we were using VPLEX. It takes a little more work when we are incorporating a third-party environment. 

I've been at my current job for almost five years, and we have been using Unity that whole time.

I believe Unity is stable. However, we haven't used it for long, so I can't really know how stable it is until we have enough time to work with it.

Scalability is one of Unity's biggest advantages. It looks like we're going to need to do a lot of expansion because any capacity we purchase gets consumed pretty fast. We'll have to increase our footprint on Unity.

I rate Dell EMC support 10 out of 10. They respond rapidly and do a good job. When I have an issue and need technical support, I reach out to them either through chat or by submitting a service request, and the response is good.

Positive

My company was using EMC Symmetrix. They moved from Symmetrix to Dell EMC VNX and then Unity. They have not done any other evaluations of other vendors aside from EMC.

Implementing Unity was straightforward. We were able to move through the process of setting up the systems based on the procedure the vendor provided without any problems. Once we got started, I think it was just a couple of days. 

The company purchased a support contract, so we worked with Dell EMC to deploy the system.

We just deployed these new Unity systems a couple of months ago, so we haven't had an opportunity to assess the cost savings yet. As we continue moving ahead, we'll be able to do that. The company is scaling up Unity, so if they are willing to scale up quickly, they like the product, and there is something advantageous to the systems. Whether in terms of money or performance, they seem to be getting some value from the systems.

I'll rate Dell EMC Unity nine out of 10. It's a great, scalable product that performs well. Out of many options, it would be my first choice.