Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We use Dell EMC Unity XT as our primary storage, mostly for VMware, the tier-one storage of our VMs. We use it for SaaS and corporate. We do replications with it. I hate to call Unity your standard, basic storage, but it's your standard, basic, old-school, tried and true, reliable, classic storage. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done, has all the features you need, and is easy to use.

Performance-wise, we actually use ScaleIO for the high-performance stuff. But Unity, as your classic storage, does a fairly good job.

We actually use it just about everywhere because, in the majority of the use cases in our company, there is a need for a lot of storage but they don't have a lot of IOPS. Unity fits that use case well. For the areas that need high performance, the high IOPS, it doesn't fit. But that's okay. That's why you have multiple SAN solutions.

One of the benefits it brings is the value for its price. It has saved us a lot of money. It does the job. It just works. We just bought a bunch of new Unity's that allowed us to do a lot of consolidation. Those four Unity's replaced 13 VNXs and older Unity's. 

In terms of simplicity of ownership, I think we still have somewhere in the neighborhood 20 Unity's and they're managed by four storage guys. So, from a simplicity perspective, you can manage a lot of Unity's across a lot of data centers with a very small staff.

In addition to the price point, you factor in all the features, like replication, and that it works great.

Like most newer SANs, the interface is very simplistic. I'm still used to the old-school SAN where you need a PhD to be able to configure it. I'll pick on NetApp as an example. To work on a NetApp, needing a certification isn't a recommendation, it's a requirement. You don't want someone who hasn't had all the required training working on NetApp. On a Unity, you can throw it in a remote office and tell whoever is there, "Hey, go click on these buttons." And you really don't have to worry about them clicking on the wrong thing. 

Or if I even need them to rack and install the Unity, it's a handful of cables here and there, where it's called out and easy to follow. There is just no complexity to it. A lot of SANs are easy to use these days. Unity was - if I recall correctly, especially on the VNX line, before they changed the name to Unity - one of the first to really lead in having that simplistic interface; the "why make this hard?" mindset.

We have had some downtime. Nothing is perfect. Unity’s have had some code-release problems, versions that, from a compatibility perspective, had some glitches which caused an outage. But, given the amount of Unity’s we run, that has been fairly minor and it hasn't happened at scale or across all of our Unity’s. 

It's more like, "Hey, we have a new code. Let's deploy it," and we have a situation where we can deploy it in a given location first. So we deploy in that location. Oops, it has an issue. Roll back and get Dell EMC engaged and resolve it and move on.

It hasn't really been that big of a deal. As a great "for instance," with ExtremeIO - which we bought starting about two years ago, and deployed in one of our divisions as their primary storage because we needed performance there - it's had so many issues that upper management has essentially banned us from ever buying an ExtremeIO again, because of the downtime. Either because of compatibility or just straight up code problems, it's just not a stable SAN. And the one thing you want out of a SAN is that it has to be stable.

So as long as Unity remains good and stable, that will be a primary reason that we use it.

It scales decently to 100,000 IOPS, maybe 150,000. But as long as your IOPS requirements are below that, it does a great job.

With the nature of the architecture, there's a limitation to its total, possible throughput. So if you need IOPS above that 150,000 mark, your Unity engineer will say something like, "Oh, we just need to cluster it and do that." That's a very old-school approach. If you need more IOPS than what Unity SAN can provide, clustering is not a great option. The better option is to go with a SAN with better IOPS. Unity is good at what Unity does, so don't try to make it do what it doesn't do. It's great for bulk storage, up to a certain performance level. If you use it for that, it works great.

On a per-SAN basis we could have 3,000 to 6,000 VMs connecting to it.

Technical support is responsive, of course. If it's obviously a Unity issue, it's usually a pretty simple and straightforward fix.

It's when they say, "Well, no, the Unity's fine. It must be an issue with the host. Or it must be an issue with the VM," where you get a little bit of that finger-pointing going on. Then it becomes that struggle of stopping the finger-pointing. It's all one company so let's all get on the same phone call and figure out where the problem is.

That is usually something we have to start, whereas from a Dell EMC/VMWare/whatever-else-is-involved perspective, they're not the ones to start that bridge or that conversation.

Especially if it's a production outage, I don't care about finger-pointing. I don't want to hear about it. No one does within the organization. They want it fixed. If you don't think it's a SAN problem but it's clearly an issue with the SAN, let's get everyone involved who needs to be involved and fix the problem.

So it would be great, in terms of future support calls that fall under that finger-pointing category, to have them say, "Okay, we need to now engage so and so. Let's get them on the call."

We had a lot of VNXs that we retired and we moved over to Unity. But that's just a natural progression of the product line. We also replaced a lot of old VMAXs with Unity. It might not be the sexiest box but its performance has grown through the generations to the point where it can do the job we used to have to buy VMAXs for.

We replaced the VNXs due to multiple factors. End-of-life was a big aspect; end of service contracts. It's cheaper to install a Unity than to renew the maintenance on an old SAN. That's where it's at. 

We were able to reduce our monthly spend significantly enough by doing that consolidation that we were actually able to buy the ScaleIO's we needed for another division.

When I look for a vendor to work with, I care more about the product than the vendor. Personally, I am most happy with a mixed environment. A mixed environment tends to be typically configured to best practices more frequently, with fewer proprietary aspects. Those proprietary aspects are typically what box you in or prevent you from doing something as technology changes. By running a mixed environment, you have more flexibility and ability. With that being said, I run all things VMWare. So it's a relative thing.

From a SAN perspective, storage-wise, I look at storage as a commodity. That's really what it is. Give me a server. I don't care what it is. Give me a SAN. I don't care what it is. Make it cheap, let it hit the performance marks I need, and make it reliable. If it's those three things, what it is doesn't matter to me. Whether it's a Unity or something else, I don't care. I'm not buying the brand, I'm not buying the vendor. I'm buying a commodity.

Like I said, Unity wins on ROI. As long as it wins on ROI, as long as it wins on uptime, as long as it does the job it's doing, it will continue to be the one that gets installed. When it fails to meet those, we'll switch.

We used to have a lot of NetApp. We've always bought BMC. But we have had no problem changing vendors. We buy a lot of Cisco. We don't care what the server is. The Dell EMC servers are cheaper, so that's what we go with. It's all about satisfying the base requirements and getting the job done.

I've installed Unity’s, but it's been a few years. The setup is a piece of cake. It's super easy: click, click, click, done.

Regarding upgrades, the guys who take care of that do so on a very regular basis with no real issues. They do it through maintenance windows. But at the end of the day, they really haven't had too many problems; a few of those minor problems I've mentioned, but overall, it works well.

From an ROI perspective, I'll put it this way: When we've tried to buy other SANs, the Unity ROI makes it impossible to buy them. So usually, the only time we buy another SAN is when the ROI isn't a factor, when Unity can't do the job. From an ROI perspective, it's great because it beats out everything else.

We've tried to look at other options but, at the end of the day, when you price it out, the Unity wins.

Its biggest valuable feature is its price point for the amount of storage and performance you get. It's a sweet spot. It's cheaper than the other SANs out there, but performs well enough. It fits that nice, middle-ground portfolio.

If your small office or data center needs a couple petabytes, or just lots and lots of storage, it works great. Or if you need just a couple of hundred terabytes worth of storage, it works great. The price point hits that right spot.

As for advice to someone who is interested in this type of solution, I would simply say, "Talk to so and so, because that's what they do, and have fun." We use it across the board. So if someone needs a Unity for their project and they want their own SAN for some reason, they just have to go through the approval process. There's no fight to buying a Unity, because again, from an ROI perspective, no one argues.

In terms of the buying process, I'll start with getting a quote. I find it's pretty easy, mainly because I worked as a consultant, so I actually would build those BOMs (bills of materials); the pre-quote build. For me, it's super easy - because I've done that career-wise - to build a BOM for a SAN, Unity, or otherwise. Typically you have your BOM. And from the BOM you get your quote. From the quote you get your invoice. The BOM is the first step. You get your approvals, that this is the configuration I want.

So it is easy for me but not necessarily for your "Joe Average" person, for the rest of the storage guys. Their typical response is, "Okay, I need a new Unity with these IOPs and this capacity. Go." And they just have our partner, through whom we buy this stuff, build the BOM. The partner sends it to us and says, "Hey, this is what we're doing for you." We say, "Okay, it looks great." And it moves forward. The struggle is after you get past that point, on our side, where it goes through our approval, what we call the CAR process. That's where it takes some time. That's not necessarily a Dell EMC issue or even an issue with our partner. That's an internal logistics and political issue.

I would rate this solution at eight out of 10 because, at the end of the day, it is an old-school SAN. It really doesn't take advantage of any of the modern-day advances in SAN technology.

Our primary use case is branch office. It has performed adequately well.

Performance is the key factor within the branch offices and this platform, because it is a small form factor, definitely helps address our power-space constraint problems, within this facility. It also provides overall performance improvement of our business applications which are critical to our regional offices.

• Quick Snapshots
• Cloning, which we need in our environment
• It's all-flash array, Unity 450F
• It has performed adequately well for our business needs

There is nothing needed at this time.

It's very stable. The current firmware version we're on is the latest and greatest, so we've been pretty happy with the overall performance and availability of the platform.

Again, it's a branch office, small, so there's no need to scale it, we haven't crossed that path yet. This is our first implementation of Unity within our environment, we are primarily a VMAX shop, so our venture into the mid-range arrays was something that was brought on because we needed better performance within our regional offices.

Based upon my experience working with previous EMC platforms, the GUI is a vast improvement over the previous GUI's, the elimination of Java, the use of HTML5 was a substantial improvement, and the ease of use of the GUI made it very, very intuitive for my team and myself.

Here, we were using local Dell servers with local, attached storage, and we needed something that could provide a high level of availability for our customers in the branch, and that also fit into a small cabinet within our closet. The solution presented itself as a viable platform for what we needed in our space. The whole goal - high-availability, capacity, performance - all three were met by the Unity 450F storage platform.

It was straightforward to a point. There were some minor hiccups with the registration piece. It's something I shared with my account team, but overall, once we got past those hurdles, everything else was a simple install, configure. 

When selecting a vendor, support is the key thing.

Do your research. There are a lot of vendors out there but if you're looking for performance, price-point, ease of use, I recommend looking at Unity as a platform. It's a great platform, for mid-range businesses.

We use it for software storage and factory structures for governmental structures, as well as in insurance companies and the financial sector.

I like that the solution is scalable.

The product’s pricing should be improved.

We have around 40 users for the solution, and the maintenance requires just one engineer.

If any issues arise, you can always contact a professional from Dell. However, we don't have any support problems because it's a great product. Also, we know everything about the product.

The initial setup is not complex. We send two engineers to visit the customer site, install the equipment into the rack cabinet, establish connections, and proceed to install the software. The first one handles the installation, while the other works on connecting everything, including setting up internet cabinets. The entire setup process takes a day or two.

The basic licenses and software are included in the package. If there's a need for additional recovery tools or anything else, you can order them separately. However, normally, all required software and licenses are already included.

I recommend this product. It’s a good product to buy or sell. The primary advantage is that this product has been thoroughly tested and proven over time. You won't encounter unexpected results. It's highly predictable. When making a purchase, you can be 100% sure there won't be any unforeseen issues. Overall, I rate it an eight out of ten.

I mainly use Unity XT as a unified, hybrid storage system.

The most valuable feature is the fast cache with functionality rewrite. 

Dell could improve Unity XT by adding support for NVMe.

I've been using first EMC Clariion since 2003 and we can say that Unity XT is the last in the generation with significant improvements over time

Unity XT is stable.

Unity XT can be scaled up.

Dell's technical support is at a very high level, though it's not quite as good for organizations outside of Europe.

I previously worked with Fujitsu and IBM and would say Unity XT is very good compared to them.

The initial setup was straightforward - I would rate it five out of five.

There is no capacity license for XT and no additional costs for expansions. I would rate its pricing as four out of five.

I would give Unity XT a rating of nine out of ten.

The interface of the solution is good.

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

I have found Dell EMC Unity XT to be stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 700 people using the solution in my organization.

We are satisfied with the technical support.

We have previously used HPE solutions, but the quality was not equivalent to Dell.

Dell EMC Unity XT installation was not complex.

We have three people who maintenance and support the solution.

The price of Dell EMC Unity XT is higher compared to other solutions. The price should be less expensive.

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

We use the Unity to back-end our VMware virtual stack. We run VMware vSphere on it. It's a hypervisor, and that is what we are required to run all our VMs for both Horizon and our internal services.

We were having significant latency with our old storage arrays. With Unity's flexibility of block and file storage, we were able to start with file storage, then plan eventually moving to block storage. So, it has sped up our entire architecture.

Speed and ease of use of the interface are its most valuable features.

The Unity interface is much more advanced than some of the older ones that we had, or that I've experienced. It has made deployment, configuration, and maintenance a lot simpler.

For private cloud, it works very well.

There were a couple features that came out a little later than we originally believed, but they did come pretty much on time and met our schedule.

Like any other storage array, SAN, or NAS, it is very reliable. We haven't had any issues with it.

We know that we can add another whole tray or two of disks if we need to. We started with a high-density to begin with, but we knew we had significant space to expand when we needed it.

It has exceeded our performance expectations. We were expecting an improvement, but we were expecting to eventually in the short term come close to hitting capacity on it, and we haven't. Performance-wise, it's held up very well.

The support that we get for Dell EMC storage has been fantastic.

We were previously using NetApp, and we were at the limit of our old equipment. We were running older file storage, which was causing us a bunch of latency issues, and the Unity solved most of those problems.

The initial setup is not so straightforward if you don't have experience with storage arrays.

We used a Dell EMC consultant for the deployment. The experience was good.

The return on the investment was simply speeding up our entire vSphere stack, which allowed our developers and engineers to get their workloads done faster and simpler. We were experiencing VM snapshot times of 45 minutes to two or three hours, and it shrunk it down to under five minutes.

Based on the cost and performance the we needed, Unity was the best price. NetApp was not being price competitive.

If you're looking for a cost-effective, easy to use solution, which has scalability on a small-to-medium deployment, Unity is a very good solution for this.

We are planning to use replication very soon, and we do use snapshots.

We've been very happy.

We use it for replacing legacy storage. It's just a one-for-one.

This is primarily for storage and the data aspect of it.

Dell EMC Unity XT keeps us up and running. That is the big thing.

• Affordability
• Scalability
• Simplicity of use

I don't have any complaints from the customers or end users, who are using this solution. It's up and running with no worries.

We are very fond of the scalability. We are using the Unity 300, which has a limitation. However, if we needed more, we could go to the Unity 400, 500 or 600. We could go down the series until we get the one that meets the size that we need. It has very impressive scalability.

We're not cloud ready yet, but we like the option for the expandability.

We have Dell EMC engineers helping us out and doing some over the shoulder training. They are working with our customer right now doing data migration over to Unities from the legacy Oracle stuff. While they're doing this, they're showing people how the Unities work and the ins and outs of the software interface. 

It's been a really beneficial relationship. We work a lot with Dell EMC, because they are very accommodating. Our Dell EMC representative does what our team doesn't have the capability of doing yet, because they don't have exposure to the product. I look forward to seeing how it works out. 

Our experience recently, with newer products, has been that once they're installed, we haven't had to worry about them. If there has been an issue, like we pulled something out of a box, it's replaced within a matter of days. It's really quick. 

We really push Dell EMC with our customers because of the customer support. It's been very flexible. We always need a lot of data on the stuff that's purchased because we have people buying it on behalf of the customer. They are very good on the customer support acquisition side to provide that data. Also, the technical support that we get is fabulous.

We replaced our legacy storage, which was Oracle. We couldn't afford the maintenance agreement for it any longer. We saved millions of dollars by not going back with Oracle.

This solution has meet our overall performance expectations. We were going for form fit function. We had to meet certain guidelines. We couldn't put anything in bigger. Physically, we couldn't put in any additional capabilities. We had to meet the existing network connectivity without modifying the other systems. The versatility of the product, with the optional PCI inputs allowed us to get that. We are able to scale it up or down, for actual storage, to meet the capacity that we need. We're using it in two cases where we're doing a form fit function. One for replacement, then another for overall modernization of the same systems. We're able to take the same product and scale it up to almost three times its size with very little effort.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. We had a technician helping with migration because of the legacy aspect of the servers, and what they were connecting to. Once the the over the shoulder training is done, the process is fairly straightforward.

We used a reseller and had a consultant. The consultant had worked for Dell EMC and went to work for a consulting company. He is now back to work at Dell EMC. He actually recommended the product based on his knowledge of our program. He flushed the whole system out, as far as the build. Regarding the flexibility of the product, we have other programs within our larger branch which are starting to take on and use the Unities for storage.

The benefit that we have seen is in uptime.

While it has a good price to start, they could always make it cheaper.

We bought extended warranties out of the box because our customer has a bad habit of managing warranties. The service for the small things that we have had are always handled very quickly. 

We were on old Oracle storage and are still on some old Oracle storage. 

There are lots of options for storage solutions, but our technical and customer support team's experience with Dell EMC makes it a no-brainer for us. 

I hate to speak bad of folks, but we can't even get HPE to return our phone calls, in most cases.

Do the due diligence and look at the details: the specs of the product and scalability. There are multiple series of products in the Unity line, which are very simple to use.

It's met all of our expectations. Our users don't have any technical needs because it's up and running. Overall, we are very excited about the product.

We primarily use Dell EMC Unity XT for SAN storage for ESX data stores. It has been performing okay. We have integrated it with VMware. We do have iSCSI LUNs for some Microsoft Windows servers as well, but not many.

It allows junior engineers to administer it a lot, so senior engineers, like myself, don't have to do hands-on stuff. It's less complex.

The most valuable feature is the interface. It is really usable, easy to manage.

Looking at that ease of management, for LUN creation, I like the integration into VirtualCenter. I used to have to add LUNs manually, then scan them in and format them. It does that all for you, all in one, immediate deployment of LUNs. Also, for replication, we use RecoverPoint. It's a little clunky but, overall, the Unity part of that product works in a very simplistic manner. It's easy to manage.

I would like better integration with RecoverPoint. My major issue with the solution, all around, has been RecoverPoint more than Unity. While I like the easy user interface, I would like some more advanced features for troubleshooting built into the product, so that we can do more in-depth problem-solving.

The issue we're having right now is that we can't really see much in the interface. Support can see more, but we can't see what's going on, so we have to rely on support to send us things. I would like something that a power user, an advanced user, a subject matter expert, could actually look at and say, "Okay, this is what's going on here," to make troubleshooting easier, instead of just the happy, bubbly alerts.

One to three years.

Stability is the problem. We've had stability issues with it. We've had problems with the iSCSI interface. We've had it for two years now and for two years we've had problems where a service processor will drop, we'll lose connectivity to LUNs, we'll lose connectivity to the storage, issues like that. No matter how we've tried to chase it down, everybody just points fingers at each other. The only thing that changed in our environment was that the Unity solution was installed. It's the "least common factor."

The scalability is great. If we need to expand, it's very easy to expand.

Aside from the finger-pointing, they're generally pretty easy to work with. But in my opinion, it's hard to get up to higher levels of support. For a complex problem like we've had, it's been very difficult for us to get ahold of the right type of people. We almost need engineers or someone at a higher level. When you call in, you get the base-level people. What I always say whenever it comes to tech support is, if I'm calling you, it's not a problem that's easily solved. Because if it was easy, I would have fixed it myself. So getting to those higher levels of support has been very problematic for us. They just want to say, "It's not our issue," instead of someone actually tackling the problem.

We had a VNX before and the one that we were using was starting to be phased out. We needed to keep on support and we need to stay with a solution, for our clients, that is newer and cutting edge. We were aimed towards Unity.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is interoperability. It has to be able to integrate really well.

Deployment was complicated when we did it initially and we still have problems with it. We had a VAR come out to do the initial install.

As far as cost is concerned, it does great deduplication. From a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk. It's easy to manage, which saves us time. Overall, that time is money; it saves us money. It has a pretty good ROI.

As far as simplicity of ownership goes, I don't think there is anything aside from the maintenance licensing.

We were aiming more towards Dell EMC because that's what we had previously.

Test it really well first, and get somebody who knows what they're doing to set it up. The VAR that we were referred to was terrible. That was the root of a lot of our problems.

If we didn't have the problems that we had with it - all the problems that I highlighted above - it would be definitely a ten out of ten. But given those problems, and the fact that one of them has been going on for two years and we still don't have a solution, and the Unity is the only factor that changed in the environment...