Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We use it for a virtualization environment based on VMware vSphere.

The most valuable features include

• Snapshots
• Thin Clones
• Deduplication and compression.

It could be improved in the area of management flexibility. For example, I really need to set read-only access for LUNs, and there's no such option with Unity XT.

I would also like to see more support for object storage for S3. NetApp includes basic support for S3 to the on-top array, so it would be great if DELL EMC would include S3 for the Unity XT.

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

The stability has completely satisfied us.

The scalability has also satisfied us. We use it extensively. We purchased an expansion last year and added about 150 terabytes and we're going to purchase another expansion next year. We plan to use it until the end of support.

The services on the Unity storage are used worldwide in our organization. We have about 1,500 employees.

Dell EMC's technical support is perfect.

The initial setup was completely straightforward. Anyone who can handle "next, next, next, finish" can deploy Unity. It was deployed within half an hour.

We installed it, connected it to fabric, updated the software, went through the initial configuration dialogue, and that was it. Most of the time in getting it up and running was spent on the data migration.

For deployment and maintenance it requires just one person. In our organization that person is our storage and virtual infrastructure administrator.

We did it ourselves.

It's a great product if it fits your specific needs.

Primarily we use it for our file side storage. It's pretty solid. It's tied into our VMware environment for the virtual storage, but Exchange doesn't run on it. It's mostly just Windows File Servers at this point.

We had some issues with it in the beginning, but Dell EMC took care of them and it has just been sitting there running ever since. We haven't had any real problems since then.

For us, it is cheap and deep. That's really why we wanted it, to get an expanded amount of storage. We also run Xtremes, but they're a lot more expensive. Really, it was the cost-benefit for longterm storage.

The most valuable feature is the ability to provision storage from the CLI, versus having to go in and use the GUI every time. I can just script it out and it will create what I need. That makes it super-easy to manage. 

Also, for us, it's a set-and-forget. Since we provisioned it out, we haven't had to mess with it.

It could always use native replication. Then I could get rid of RecoverPoint.

We had some problems in the beginning, but since they did the code upgrade and the bug fix, it has been solid for the last eight months. We haven't had any issues.

Scaling is easy. If we need more, we just buy another shelf. It's probably not as easy as the Isilon, but it scales well.

Our local SE guy is awesome. Everything we have is set to call home, so that's the set-and-forget for us. If there's an issue that pops up, they immediately send equipment to our SE, and he comes in and replaces it. I never have to mess with it.

Our old arrays, the VNXs - we had a 5400 and a 5700 - were reaching the end of their days, and we wanted to go to the next step up, but not quite to the Xtreme level. Unity was the obvious choice.

When selecting a vendor, support has to be rock solid. And then, ease of use: Do they have all the features we need? Are there any outstanding issues that are going to clash with our onsite stuff (which usually ends up being with AIX)? As far as Dell EMC goes, we've been pretty good with them for a while.

The setup process was pretty straightforward, similar to any other storage device. I don't think there were any special considerations we had.

We've only had it running for not quite a year yet. I can't say, versus our other arrays, if the ROI is better or worse at this point.

We only use Dell EMC and Pure for storage. We went with Dell EMC because of cost. We have an aging Isilon that we're also replacing. We do have Pure, we do the flash array there, but that's quite expensive compared to the Unity. What we needed was dependable cheap and deep storage.

It really depends on your specific needs: if it's speed or if it's longterm storage. Dell EMC has a whole array of products. I would say go for it. We used to push the Isilon a lot, that's super cheap and deep, and that's been rock solid as well, but you lose that block functionality. You really need to go to the Unity. I would definitely do the Unity over the SC.

It was pretty easy to order. We got rezoned when Dell took over, so our sales rep is out of a different state. But, as far as going through our partner, it was perfectly fine, like any other normal purchase.

I would rate the Unity at about seven out of ten, once the bugs were fixed. To be a ten it would need native replication.

We're using Dell EMC Unity as our primary storage for our production and for our DR site. We've had no performance issues with it, whatsoever.

We're using it for our data storage, for our virtual machines. It's the only array that we have, so we're not doing tiering at all. Everything is on the unit. We're using it for the data storage that we replicate to our DR site, for the ones that just stay local. We're using it for allocating raw disk-mapping, for mapping storage from the SAN directly to virtual machines for super-clusters and the like. We're using it for everything

The fact that it's all-flash has really helped our overall performance.

It's easy to manage. We access it and manage it through Unisphere and have had no issues. We're able to provision storage, create consistency groups, create RDMs for our virtual machines. Creating it through Unisphere, it automatically adds the data store on the VMware side and rescans the LUNs. We just have to add and configure the storage in one place and it takes care of everything, which is very handy.

Unity only does compression. It would be nice if there was a deduplication feature as well. At my previous job, we used XtremIO and that had deduplication and not compression, and I think we got more out of it because the more OSs you have that are the same, the fewer copies it needs to keep of all that data. So, the deduplication would be a nice feature to have.

We've had almost no stability issues.

We had an issue once and it turned out to be a bug. There was a memory leak and we had an issue in our DR site where one controller would reboot and then come back up and then, later on, the other controller would reboot and come back up. Then it happened once on our production site where both controllers went down at the same time. We worked with Dell Support and they found a memory leak and they recommended we upgrade to the latest code version.

They have a script you run, a utility to gather the logs, etc., and then they analyze. The hardest problem was that, because they're analyzing logs, they have a certain SLA in which to do that. Even though we had a production issue and we wanted it resolved right away, it took them a few days to analyze the logs and get back to us.

We've added more and more on to it, and had no issues with it. When we started there, they had just deployed Unity. It was used in a few places, but not all that much. We've been migrating more and more over to it to get off of and retire the VNX, and we've had no issues. The compression has been working well.

We came from a VNX platform and we had lots of performance issues on the VNX, especially when we were doing OS patching. When all the reboots happened at the same time, we had performance hits on the VNX, systems crashed, and so on. And with the Unity, we have no issues. It's much easier to manage than the VNX. I've been managing both, but I've found the Unity is a bit easier to manage and to deploy.

From what I understand, the VNX was coming off of support and our company worked directly with our Dell EMC rep to see what was out there, what we could use, which storage arrays have which features, and they went with Unity.

To go with all-flash with Dell EMC, you've got XtremIO and you've got Unity. Unity is the type of array that you can size yourself and say, "This is how much storage I want," and you can add on in the future. With XtremIO, you're buying a set package and you get what you get.

Each solution is dependent on the use case so it's really hard to give advice without knowing the exact use case the person is trying to fill. But we're very happy with Unity.

I rate it at nine out of ten. If they added dedupe, that would get me to a ten.

Most of the customers that I work with are using it for virtualization platforms. They are looking at it from a block data perspective. Most of them are leaning towards an Isilon platform for file-based data, so most of our traditional VNX customers have moved to the Unity platform, mostly for their structured block data.

Most customers are using it to gain some technical advantages through its simplicity and ease of use.

The benefits are the simplicity, flexibility and the ease of integration between the Unity platform and VMware, for example, and Microsoft platforms; the integration tools and the simplicity of management.

There have been big shifts, of course, in technology moving away from kind of the traditional three-tier architecture, so the Unity has gotten to the point where it's, once again, simple and optimized. Dell EMC has done a really good job of putting together a platform, one that is well supported.

There really aren't many weak spots, not many places to improve it.

The stability has been solid through dozens of implementations with our customers, from small to medium businesses running anywhere from 8TB to 10TB, up to some of our big enterprise customers using Unity for specialized systems running all-flash and half a petabyte type of scale. The performance and the stability of the platform have been stellar. No issues from customers.

Also, simple upgrades, stability right through the upgrade processes, they are very non-disruptive. It has been fantastic for all of our customers.

Moving away from the traditional EMC Clariion integration with the VNX, and some challenging upgrades through that process - specifically on the file side - the Unity, especially the all-block Unity platforms that we have been selling most of, are very simple, seamless, non-disruptive upgrades. Most customers are extremely happy with that. On the file side, the Unity is much easier to upgrade than it was traditionally with the VNX, so, once again, a big improvement over previous solutions.

The role I'm in, I'm not directly calling EMC for support. I did, for years, but I haven't with the Unity platform. I do get to handle a lot of our customers, any kind of challenging scenarios, making sure that my resources, my technical resources are responding, are as responsive as can be to our customers. 

I know from my group of technicians who support our customers, and from our customers, that the tech support has been very, very solid on the Unity platform. I won't say it's perfect across the board for all Dell EMC products, but primary storage, the traditional EMC - the VNX rolling into the Unity platforms - has been stellar.

I would put this solution at a solid nine out of 10. I don't think there is such thing as a perfect infrastructure. There is always room for improvement, even though I can't think of any. It is a strong platform.

In terms of advice, I think there are a couple of things. One of the reasons why I lean towards the Dell EMC solutions, as an EMC guy/reseller, is because of the completeness of vision. Across the data center with the disaster recovery, the integration with tools like RecoverPoint, with VMware, with some of the VMware tools, insight into the entire stack up and down. I would push most of my customers in that direction, versus a lot of the other players that are out there in the market today. We have seen some of them go by the wayside, we see a lot of new start-ups coming up. We see a lot of pressure from some of those start-ups that have an interesting gimmick.

Ultimately, when it comes right down to it, it's the supportability, it's the completeness of vision that Dell EMC has, and the integration. Typically, I will push most of my friends, colleagues, and customers, towards that platform.

Primary use is mid-range storage. We have two variants, we have the hybrid version and the all-flash version. It's for general use. For high performance, we have different systems.

For the hybrid version, the benefit is that data is stored on relatively cheap storage. Hot data is on faster storage. On the all-flash version, lower energy costs help, if you want to pursue green IT.

In the hybrid version, I would say they are fast. They have fully automated storage tiering. In the all-flash version, higher performance, compression, data replication.

• One-to-many replication.
• Data deduplication.
• Asynchronous Fibre Channel replication. It is asynchronous on iSCSI and I would like to have that on the Fibre Channel.
• Unisphere-wise, I have to log in to each Unity as a unique environment. In VNX, I logged in to the domain and I was logged in to every VNX. So that's missing.
• I miss storage groups. Now, if I have to add a LUN to a cluster, multiple host, I have to know which host is in that cluster. I have to write it down and that makes it hard. In VNX and earlier, I could simply put a LUN on a storage group and every host in the group had the LUN. This lack bothers me a lot because it takes a lot of time and mistakes are made. Sometimes, a Hyper-V host gets a VMware LUN and vice-versa. Not good.

Stability could be better. I've had a few storage processor reboots; not as often as with VNX. And Clariion was a disaster. So, it has improved.

The scalability is less than with VNX. In the VNX, I could replicate out to more than one storage system. On Unity, it's one on one. If I could migrate one to many, that would be helpful, but that is missing now.

I'm certified myself. We have certified colleagues. But we use technical support. The problem is that some of the time we are more knowledgeable than them.

VNX1/2

Tech-refresh

The setup is straightforward.

in-house

no clue

no clue. I'm technical, I don't do prices

No. We only use EMC

The hardware is fine, a nine or a 10 out of 10. Manageability is a seven or eight out of 10, because of the storage group and the domain absence. Overall, if I put the two together, the solution is a nine out of 10.

My advice would be to stick with VNX. If the developers come up with a solution for single sign-on for multiple Unity's, and if they bring back the storage groups, I'm fine with it. It's a good solution.

The primary use case is for our reporting environment, business intelligence and analytics. We run our Oracle and SAS-based applications on it right now. The performance is sufficient and we don't have any complaints about it. 

It runs our business analytics environment, so it improves reporting performance, how they pull data.

For our environment just having a solid, running box is really sufficient.

The administration of it is fine. For the most part, it is easy to manage. There is not a lot that you really need to change, there is not that much you really need to do. 

The Active Directory integration isn't very good, it is kind of limiting. It's okay.

When you get into more advanced storage administration, it's really hard to find that stuff, but those situations are few and far between, so it's not that relevant.

Also, I called about an issue where I couldn't get VVOLs registered. It turns out it is a bug in the code and that there is no information about when it will be fixed. It's just not going to work. I was a little miffed about that, especially getting more into VVOLs with Pure Storage, but it is what it is.

I would like to see better support for VVOLs and a less hokey AD-integrated login. Those are probably the two things that bug me the most.

I haven't had any issues with stability.

We did an upgrade not that long ago and that was a little rough. They uploaded the firmware and it seems it was corrupted. When they went to go live with the upgrade process they had to re-download it, which took a while. I didn't have any issues personally but I saw some of the trials that the support and then the engineering teams went through. It made me a little anxious, watching that process.

The scalability is fine. There's not much for me to really say about scalability. Adding disk is really the scalability factor, for right now. We only have two shelves of storage disks so I don't have any concerns about or needs for scalability.

Support was responsive.

I am not sure we've gotten to the point of getting a return because we've spent three years investing in trying to build out our SAS platform. I'm not sure we're there yet.

Vet out your use case sufficiently, make sure you understand what you are trying to achieve and how you are trying to achieve it. Do your best to leverage the gambit of functionality, as opposed to focusing on one area.

I rate it at eight out of ten. The best would be no issues, no concerns. I can't imagine I'd give anyone a ten, to be honest. To achieve that is pretty hard.

I wouldn't not recommend Unity.

We use our Dell EMC Unities to store the bank's data. We have one Unity in our production environment and another Unity at our disaster recovery site.

We use it in conjunction with VMware. We store all our virtual machines on Unity. 

The Dell EMC unity interface is simple to manage. We manage it by ourselves. We create logs to store data. It's also easy for us to use because we use other solutions which are built for Unity, like VMware, which are recovery points. They work with the Dell EMC Unity system, as these products integrate well in our environment. 

All our applications have been migrated to VMware.

It's very reliable. I have not had an issue with Dell EMC Unity. 

Their service is good. If there is an issue with our Unity, Dell will sometimes call me before I even know I received a notification. They will tell me that some disks are bad and needed replacement. Whenever we have issues, they respond very quickly. 

We are using all-flash disk, so the speed is very good.

The solution is stable.

We are a small bank. It is very scalable whenever we want to expand the disk storage. 

Dell EMC technical support is very good. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. They take you by the hand and walk you through every issue. They explain the issue and follow up on it.

Whenever we need help to service the system or apply any upgrades, their customer service is good.

We used Dell EMC for the setup. We had a Dell EMC engineer and a third-party engineer come in. The Dell EMC engineer came and set up what he had for the disk. He took away the complexity from us, so I didn't see it. We had a third-party help us as well during the installation. 

My part was mainly just administering the system. If I had an issue, I just made a short phone call to Dell EMC.

In the past, we used to have a physical server dedicated for Exchange or SQL. We have been able to virtualize those systems. Therefore, we cut our costs on the hardware and the backup is simpler in a VM environment. With Unity, we can easily replicate all our data to our production. 

For DR, the solution is very efficient for us. It has also allowed us to centralize our data repository.

While Dell EMC is costly, I don't have any complaints about their licensing model.

We have also used Dell EMC CLARiiON and Symmetrix within the Dell EMC shop. What attracted to us to Dell EMC Unity was its flash disk technology.

Outside of Dell EMC, we looked at IBM and HPE. However, we have VMware as a recovery point for replication, and those VMware solutions work together well with Unity.

The purchasing process was uncomplicated. We went through a third-party reseller who has a relationship with Dell. They know the product well, so they specialize in it. We gave them our needs and they were able to recommend the appropriate solution to Dell, the sizing, etc. This helped us out. 

We can sleep at night because the support is great.

The primary use case is to replace stream I/O and other VNX traditional spinning disks with a less expensive all flash. However, it should have the same five nines availability.

It's easier to carve out months and present them to hosts as opposed to some of the older Dell EMC solutions.

The majority of our vSphere environment is running on Dell EMC Unity. Exchange is also running on it. Most of our environment is split-up. Only really mission critical applications are on stream I/O. Unity has ended up being our main storage platform.

It is all cost-based. It's as good as a VMAX All Flash with stream I/O. In terms of our use case, we're not thinking of deduplication. However, looking at it based on cost per gigabyte, it's certainly very effective.

Dell EMC Unity is not sexy. It doesn't have all the flash and pizzazz of some of the other storage vendors.

We've had no issues with it. 

The performance is great. We have four or five different Unity arrays, and they have all run flawlessly.

I haven't used technical support.

Dell EMC did the entirety of the setup.

We have seen tremendous ROI.

Because of the attractive price, we were able to get rid of more expensive arrays, standardize, and get rid of a lot of spinning disks. We also got rid of more expensive flash that we weren't properly utilizing.

I've had so many nightmares with so many other arrays, but I have no complaints with Dell EMC Unity at this time.

It is a workhorse and will run even demanding workloads.