Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

It is used for deduplication and encryption.

• Easy to scale
• Easy to maintain

Easy to use management.

I like that it is wizard-driven. In past iterations, it has made it easier to cross-train the team.

It is very stable.

The scalability definitely meets our businesses requirements. It is highly scalable.

The technical support is good. However, the support portal needs fixing. Accessing a service request on the support portal seems to be a bit difficult, as opposed to just calling the 800 number. I do think it has improved over time.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Go with the virtual appliance versus the hardware.

We integrate the solution with VMware. There have been some cost involved with this.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: the relationship.

We use it for mass and block storage. 

We have not had issues nor performance problems with it.

It has saved us time when provisioning new storage, so we're trying to automate that process.

It's pretty easy to use compared to the older version of the product, which was called VNX. This product is way easier to use.

It performs well. 

They have a Unity REST API that I use to automate some of the storage stuff. I'm just getting started with it, but it seems pretty easy to use.

Dell EMC Unity's competitor, NetApp, has a similar product. However, it has a clustering technology where you can group multiple systems together, then you can move data from one system to another seamlessly. I would like the Unity to do that.

It would be nice to have been able to easily move off our old VNX system to this system. The process is very manual.

The stability is fine.

We haven't really upgraded yet, but I know we can scale to about 500 drives with the system that we have. We are about halfway full. The scalability seems fine.

Technical support has been good and responsive. They know how to fix an issue.

Compared to our old platform, everything is more tightly integrated. I don't have to go to different sections to do something. A lot of it is wizard-driven, so it's an easy to use system.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy.

Deployment was pretty easy. We had a guy come in who did all the work.

Licensing is fine. We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity.

It's a good product.

We use the product with VMware, and also use it with Syft for home directory and departmental shares.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support.
• How long the company has existed.
• Is it an established company and product?
• Performance.

We use it for SAN and NAS, pretty much all of our VMware and ERP systems; everything for storage. It' working out very well. We just moved into it

They've integrated NAS and SAN pretty well. It made replication very simple. Because one of our systems has a lot of LANs, for it to replicate we have Consistency Groups in there. That's something that is really helpful, making sure that everything is working, not just for replication but for backups as well. Pretty much everything we need is there.

We're probably going to be looking into vSAN just to minimize the footprint. We've already minimized the footprint going from VNX to the Unity, but as we're virtualizing more and more, once we're completely virtualized, we'd probably be looking into vSAN through either VxRail or VxRack, and go that way. The smaller the footprint at the data center, the less cost there is.

So far, we've had no issues. We've been running the Unity for about half a year now; no issues with stability at all.

We've only had it for a short time so we haven't had to scale up. We got it scaled to our needs with a little bit of growth put on there.

The team that we got to help us implement it were spot on. They really did do a great job. There were a few cases where we had to pull in some more experienced guys for the networking aspect of it, for the NAS, as there were some issues. But everything else was spot on.

The initial setup was fairly simple because they were able to take all of our information from the VNX and size it appropriately, have all the LUNs set up. The only complex part about it was how we were going to do the SAN to SAN replication, which involved getting everybody on all of the equipment on the latest code, to make sure that we could actually go ahead and replicate. That took some extra work to get that done, but in the end, it was all taken care of and we got replication going.

The pricing is reasonable. We're using the Flex on Demand pricing. It's really good for us when we pay for what we use. It made it easy to get it inside since it's an OpEx and instead of CapEx expense.

I can't say enough about the Flex on Demand because it gives you the agility you need. You can get it in there so easily. You don't have to be fighting with the CFO about how much it costs. It's a lot easier.

It's a really good buy.

We're about to replace a VNX with a Unity in our DR facility. We love that it's only taking about half a rack of space versus the rack-and-a-half that we have for the VNX. That's really good. We're going to be doing SAN to SAN replication. We currently have that going on between the Unity and the VNX using RecoverPoint Appliances, but then it's going to be Unity to Unity after we're done.

I'm very happy with the Unity right now.

We use it for post to all our data stores or virtual environment.

We have had no performance issues. 

As far as benefits, Dell EMC Unity XT gives us fast access orders for everybody in accounting, and it's working. It is all-flash and is in extreme hyper-performance mode. 

When there have been critical updates, we will get phone calls from Dell EMC saying, "We need to update this, and because our contract support level is here, we can do this for you." They will bug you to death until you have updated it, which is good because we are overwhelmed.

It's all-flash.

The solution is so easy to manage that I forget it is there.

Their support is now a lot better, so that is good. They are very helpful when we called in and say, "This is the project that we want to do. Which box should we go about buying? They will send us the information and go through it with us."

We have had issues with the capacity and some misunderstandings on how much compression that we should be able to see out-of-the-box. When we were originally sold the box, it was before the merger. The salesman promised us at least a 50 percent compression on the box, so we ordered it with 2TBs of storage. That was a mistake, because now we are locked into smaller drivess. When it comes down to it, we are running out of space. 

We realized that were barley getting a 12 percent compression offset, not the 50 percent, and this came about the time of the merger. All of this was happening and a lot of people in the company did not return emails at the time. I guess it's because they were no longer with the company or they knew they wouldn't be, that's just speculation. However, it took us several months and almost ruined the our reputation during that time period. They did make right on it and sent us several drives to double the storage on our devises for free, so they made it right towards the end, but it took a while.

The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing. 

Three to five years.

The box has been on 24/7/365 with the exception of one day when we had to change out the batteries in our battery backup. We realized our network cord was not working in it. 

When I left to come the conference, I looked, and uptime on the battery said "527 days".

You only have so many days in the storage. When you buy storage, buy more than you think you'll need, because it will come back and bite you. Because now, if we expand anymore, we will have to buy a box to piggyback on this storage. Hindsight is 20/20, but all-flash is expensive.

Technical support is much better now. They are  responsive, and it is easy to get to the right person. They will blow up your inbox and voicemail if you have a critical update that needs to be applied to either the drives or the box itself, which is great.

Previously, all our servers were running one instance of Windows, and running as a particular application. Email servers were on a server unto themselves. We had a mess. We had so much hardware. 

Because of Dell EMC Unity, I was able to turn off the server that I had been managing for ten years for email. This makes the server room a little quieter now!

We bought the box of all the licensing that we needed and not run into anything where we would need any additional licenses from Dell EMC Unity.

VMware is a different story, but as far as Unity goes, it's not been an issue.

Currently, we buy directly from Dell EMC. We've tried going through resellers before, but we've found that if we go directly through Dell EMC, we get a good a price from being with the government. So, we are lucky there. We have that working relationship with the folks at Dell EMC, and sometimes I even get to run into the rep or specialist at events, which is great. I don't get that with a reseller.

We also looked at iXsystems. We just purchased one of their boxes for storage. I've known iXsystems for a number of years, and they gave us a great price on an absolutely insane amount of storage because all we needed was a box set in a bunker for local backups. The Unity was just outrageously expensive for our needs, so we went with iXsystems. I've managed an iX box in the past. Those guys will bend over backwards to help you as well. So, that's why I chose to go with them.

Spec it out with bigger drives than you think you will need, because when you do expand, you're going to wish you had done that. If you buy bigger drives than what you currently have in a RAID, now you have to have a separate data storage. You can't have one continuous data store. For some people, that might be okay, but we really didn't want that but we were forced into having that.

We do integrate with vSphere. We tried Hyper-V and immediately regretted that decision and went back to vSphere. Right now, that is the only utilization and there are costs involved with the VMware integraton.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• The willingness to make it right when something goes wrong.

All of our servers are Dell EMC servers. We have it integrated with SharePoint and all of our applications.

It's been a great infrastructure to build upon.

For me, the best thing is the reliability. Even some of ours that are somewhat old or out of warranty have a very solid, excellent reliability.

I love the systems management of the servers. It's easy to set up, easy to monitor.

Excellent stability. A lot of ours are older, even past what would be considered end-of-life, but they still have a very low failure rate.

Scalability is good. We use some Dell EMC blade servers, so it's easy to add another blade server without a lot of cabling or setup.

Good tech support. We can usually get a parts dispatch without too much fuss.

The initial setup was easy.

The pricing is right in line with competitors.

I always recommend Dell EMC servers in general, as far as their reliability goes and the management software built in.

I rate it at nine out of ten. Overall, we're very happy with the product. It's not perfect, there are little bits of improvement that could be made to things that we use such as Dell EMC OpenManage Essentials, minor things. It's good, just not perfect.

We use it for virtualization. We have integrated it with Exchange and VMware vSphere.

This is actually part of a delivered solution. We have a VCV block, into which the Unity is embedded. The Unity is one of three components. We've got compute and networking in there. The overall product, with Unity being a component, is fine. And individual Vblocks are fine, but the stretched vCenter that we have was complex. Their product is called VPLEX and it was expensive.

It performs as expected.

• Stability
• Interoperability with the other components of the system

I would like to see better automation of upgrades, more seemless upgrades.

It's very stable.

It's fairly scalable. We went through a scale-up and it performed as expected.

The initial setup was moderately complex.

Hitachi.

If it's a value for your company then I'd recommend it. For us, it was expensive, but it was of value to us.

However, I wouldn't go through that again. We are targeting hyperconverged now, as opposed to converged. It was a bit overwhelming. From the VCE perspective, the individual Vblocks were very well executed, but they didn't seem to know the VPLEX product very well, and that was nail-biting.

We were looking for an option for an all-flash array with a lower cost than the XTremIO.

It's easier to administer than some of the alternatives that we had. The teams find it easy to manage. We're a big EMC shop anyway, so for us it was just a lower-tier alternative at a good performance point for the price.

We are leveraging its integration with other applications and there were no significant costs to do so.

The most valuable feature is the performance. It's still an all-flash array at a good price point.

It needs deduplication. We'd like to have the dedupe capabilities in the Unity.

It's very stable. No issues with it.

It's been acceptable in terms of scalability as well. We've found that it's easy to expand and not too expensive.

Dell EMC, generally, is good from a technical support perspective. We really never have issues.

It's hard to say what our ROI is. We don't do a lot of hard ROI.

The pricing is competitive. We miss some of the feature functionality that we had with the XtremeIOs but it's certainly suitable for the purpose.

Weigh your options. The landscape has changed a lot since we bought it, it's been a couple of years. It's a good product but you will certainly want to survey the landscape.

The most important criteria when choosing a vendor include the longevity of the product, certainly ongoing support as well. I've got a good relationship with Dell EMC, we like the product. If I'm not mistaken it was based on the VNX platform; it's basically an all-flash version. We had some familiarity with it and the all-flash piece was very compelling.

I would rate it at eight out of ten. There are just a few features that we'd like to see at that price point. But generally, it has been pretty stable.

Our primary use case is virtualization.

It's a great product if you want something that just works, and works fairly well. It's a product that's tested, tried, and true, where a multitude of customers have depended on the product for the overall requirements of their companies' data. Typically, a company's data is the lifeline of the company. So, if you want something that's tried, tested, and true, that is relatively feature-rich, and that just works, go for it, right. It's a fantastic product.

There are a lot of things that can be done with it. It's got Cloud IQ, but I think it's not as mature as it could be, they could make it more effective. They could make it more comparable to some of the other products out there that have cloud analytics. The amount of insight that the Unity product is able to give, at this point, is okay, but not class-leading. Some of the other data-reduction technologies, like deduplication, are not to the level of other competitors and what their products provide.

I'm nitpicking here and there. Overall, it's a solid product.

It's a stable product. You look at something like Unity, which is based on several generations of product, it's built on products such as the Clariions and the VNX, etc., so it's pretty stable. It's a tried and true product.

If you build it out correctly and it's intended for the workloads that you anticipate, then it's absolutely scalable. If you start to do more with it, and it wasn't built for that particular use case, then it's not as scalable. At the same, with Unity now, you've got the ability to do data-in-place upgrades. From that aspect, it can be relatively more scalable.

I have not used the technical support myself because I'm the architect building out the solution.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. Most arrays these days, they've made them pretty easy to set up. There's typically a management setup, and so on, that you have to follow through. But it's not overly difficult.

It's going to be hard for Dell EMC to really rebuild Unity because Unity, in my opinion, is still a more traditional array. Although they've improved the code, there's only so much they can do, because it's based on technology that's over ten years old. So, for them to make it more next-generation would be difficult. You're getting a tried and true product and you're slapping feature sets on top of it, which is good, but it's not going to be a true next-generation product. And that's okay, it's intended for a certain use case and it works well.

It's better than an average product but it's not a "godsend" product.