Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We have Dell EMC Unity XT in one of our branch office data centers, and we use it for a small number of users. It's a first step into the flash storage system for us. It has worked very well for us. We're very happy with how it works.

We're a VMware house, so we've integrated it into ESX and we use it as our target environment for vRA. It's worked really well.

We've had it just about over two years now, and it's performing very well. It has fulfilled all our needs. We've had none of the I/O issues that we had seen on our previous SAN. It's worked really well.

In terms of service and deployment, it was done easily. It was a big SAN beforehand, so being flash, it was configured quickly. The footprint that it left in the data center was small, so it has definitely consolidated everything that we've put in there. Across-the-board, our first step into flash went really well.

Ease of use would really be the best feature. We were easily able to get the correct performance details from it. And the configuration was great, it was relatively easy as well; that was brilliant.

In terms of managing it, the performance metrics that it gives, generic stuff, it does everything that we need it to do. We didn't have to create any custom reporting. It all went well.

It has ticked all the boxes for us so far. A fourth year of maintenance at a good price would be good.

One to three years.

From the beginning, we've had no issues. Since it's been turned on, it's worked flawlessly.

We probably overcompensated with the numbers that we put into it in the beginning, so we've not had to upscale anything yet. We're still using it two-and-a-half years later, which is proof that it works.

We have the Call Home feature, which is a kind of preemptive alert for us. So Dell EMC has been telling us when there have been issues. There really haven't been any big ones; minor things, maybe firmware needed to be upgraded. But other than that, it's been fine.

We were using something different. We were coming from the typical fiber background. We needed to get something new, so we looked at a few different options at the time. We went with Dell EMC Unity because we were seeing a higher I/O through the data center, and we thought flash would be the one for us. That's why we went with the Unity box. Also, we went from a 20U footprint down to an 8U footprint. At the time, it was a massive consolidation, space-wise. It did everything else to fill all the proper metrics that we were looking at.

The other criterion we had for vendor selection was ease of use, that was a big thing for us. We've used Dell EMC everywhere else, so we thought it would be a good model to fit in with everything that we have. Going that way was the right step for us.

From the beginning, I worked with Dell EMC on getting it set up the way we wanted it, carved out the way we needed it. It was easy. They got it done in a few hours and it's worked really well since.

The ROI comes down to the level of effort that we've had to put in to make it work, which has been relatively small. That's a massive return on investment for any team.

NetApp was one that we had, they were in contention. We had an IBM solution that they were going to put in place. EqualLogic was also on the shortlist. But we thought Dell EMC Unity would be a good choice for us.

If you're looking at a flash-based system, one that you want to work and not to have to play around with it - to be sure it's working all the time - Unity is definitely a step in the right direction for any company, going forward.

In terms of the purchasing process, we came from the EMC side. It was our first branch into flash after using EMC for so long. It's worked flawlessly, so we have no issues there.

I rate this solution at eight out of ten. Nothing's perfect. It's very hard to make something perfect. Being an eight, it's a really good model for any company to choose. It's a realistic metric to put against something, rather than saying it's perfect.

The speed and performance that we get through the SSD hard drives. That's a big factor for us.

We have a date warehouse server. Prior to being on Unity, we could get about one or two data warehouse refreshes a day. After standing that up in VMware and using Dell EMC Unity, we are able to get four data warehouse refreshes, which gives our finance and accounting group more information to react to throughout the day for inventory and purchasing.

I'm able to manage it very simply. The interface is a lot easier than the couple of VNX2s that we have. At least to me, Dell EMC Unity has a quicker responsive web GUI for management.

The quick integration with VMware. The ability to stand up a data store in one place, where you don't have to go and rescan for the data store through the vCenter Client, as well as SMB shares. This ended up being a big selling point for us.

I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage.

Stability has been 100%. We have had zero failures.

We have added one additional shelf to one of the two Unities. As far as I can tell, it went really well. It was not something I was involved with, but we may have had Dell EMC assist us with that.

In the SQL Server instances in our data warehouse, we immediately saw a great return on investment.

We purchased our Unity in September 2017. It was a simple process. We budgeted for it in the prior year. Then, we had the funds to take care of what we wanted to purchase.

I did bring up other vendors that I have worked with: NetApp and HPE SAN. Comparing them to my previous work and working with Unity now, I find Unity a lot easier to work with. For example, the NetApp seems to be more complex in just the ease of setting it up.

Do a little research into how you will create your storage groups. Ensure they have all lined out prior to going in and making one single storage group take up all the hard drives which we've seen some individuals do before and have to break it back down and start over. Definitely manage out what you want to place on the SSDs or on that Unity for your quickest response time. We've made sure that all of our high availability productions devices are on the Unity.

We have Hyper-V and VMware running on the Unity. We have moved Exchange off into Exchange Online onto the cloud. We did most of the integrations in-house. The big thing that we have done on it is running SQL Server. We have quite a few different SQL Server instances running on the SSDs.

Our primary use case for Unity - we use the All-Flash, we don't use the Hybrid array - is as our go-to source for all of our virtualized Oracle Databases. We've moved about 95 percent of our Oracle Databases to Unity. There are a few extremely high-profile databases that nobody wants to move. Nobody wants to touch them. But pretty much everything else is on Unity. We're starting to branch out and put just regular, general purpose load on there. And we also recently put all of our Exchange environment on there as well.

We started going down the path of doing the vCenter integration, but we just ran out of time for testing it. That's on our bucket-list of things to do, because that'll make it even easier. But we haven't hit that yet.

As far as how Dell EMC Unity XT has performed, I don't think I've ever seen latencies above 10 milliseconds, unless it was something that wasn't the array that was messing up. The thing is rock-solid.

We've recently gone from a five-man team down to two, not because of the Unity solely, but we haven't necessarily had to replace everyone. We've been able to consolidate a lot of VNXs into just a couple of Unity's. We have less to manage and we need fewer people.

As far as the simplicity goes, adding hosts is easier. Everything is just about automatic. We're used to those old VNX1s, which are running Windows CE. Using the CLI on those is a little clunky, while logging into the CLI on the Unisphere is easy. It just makes sense, especially if you're used to Unix, because it's a Unix-based system. It's all-around easier to use.

• Being that we are heavily invested in VNX1s, the UI itself is fantastic, and the ease of administration is far better than Unisphere or Navisphere ever were. It's very easy to manage.
• The fact that it has built-in APIs means our automation people can help us automate a lot of tasks, and that has been helpful.
• And, of course, it's really fast. Obviously, that doesn't hurt anything at all.

One to three years.

At this point, we've only had one major issue, and we've had two of the systems in-house for a year and a half. The issue was fixed within a matter of hours by support. In that same year and a half, we've had a lot of other pieces of equipment that have had a lot of other issues, so the stability is great, at least for us.

We just recently started using the Dynamic Pools, so while it's scalable, we actually find it valuable that we can just pop in one or two drives when we need to, instead of having to add a whole RAID set. That has actually been very handy for us. A lot of the time, as a government organization, we don't always get all the money we ask for. Sometimes, the money that gets slated to us gets pulled out, last-minute, so we're trying to buy drives and hoard them. We always put drives in last-minute, and that's been extremely helpful.

I know that's not exactly the question in terms of scalability, but that has been more helpful to us than being able to add a zillion disks at a time. Being able to add onesies, twosies to a pool is really helpful.

The initial setup was very easy. I don't really remember any "gotchas."

We're a Dell EMC shop, we don't have any other storage vendors, so we don't really do a good job of looking into the storage vendors either. We have a good relationship with Dell EMC, we have a good sales guy and a good technical account manager. We trust them. When we told them that we had a lot of people asking for all-flash, that was the choice. We don't use enterprise-level stuff, we don't use VMAX. So we went with Unity.

When selecting a vendor, the relationship with the technical support is pretty important. We've been a Dell EMC shop for a long time, so there are some guys in the tech support whose emails I have. I don't necessarily have to open up an SR. If I just have a question I can just email them and I'll usually get a response in a day or two. That keeps me from having to do some of that paperwork. The other thing, when selecting a vendor, if I were the number-crunching guy: Obviously a vendor who's willing to work on price is always going to be helpful.

A piece of advice when it comes to research is to try to find another company that's using what you're considering. After you talk to the salespeople, after you get the dog and pony show, have them connect you with somebody who's using it, who they trust - maybe even someone you know or have some contact with - and get their thoughts about it. You usually get a lot more truth from those kinds of conversations.

Our primary usage is for our users on our civilian side. We deal with both military and civilian, but it's mainly for our civilian users. We recently started using it, six months ago. Our customers like it a lot. It's an improvement from what we were using. We use it for our Outlook and Exchange but we haven't implemented with our VMware yet.

It gives us an easier way to manage our users. We have a lot of users, so it's better on that side of things. Compared to the HPE product we were using beforehand, it's definitely simpler. The interface is smoother too compared to the HPE product. The team that we have now prefers it, so far.

The interface is pretty easy and it didn't take too long to get trained on it.

We haven't had any issues with it, any outages. We have a lot of users and it's been able to handle our high usage rate.

We haven't increased in size much. Given the user rate we're at now, we think it will probably scale pretty easily without having any issues.

We have not had to use technical support.

We were using HPE before. It wasn't that we needed to switch, but we switched because we were having a few issues. They wanted to try something new. When we did so, the users and the IT team and the customers preferred it. They thought it was a lot smoother.

Because we work with the DoD, they have a list of devices that are approved. That's the list they go off of.

It was more our Tier 3 team that did the setup, but they didn't have any issues with it. Most of them have a lot of experience with a lot of equipment so, it was pretty smooth.

I definitely see value in it. We will probably implement it in other locations that we have as well, since we currently only use it at our main location. It has definitely been useful equipment.

If a friend or colleague was using the equipment that we were using beforehand, we'd definitely tell them to transition over because it is a lot easier to use.

I'd rate it about a nine out of ten. It's smooth, has been an easy transition, the interface is a lot easier than the one we were working with. The setup was easy and we haven't had any problems with it. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's really good equipment.

We use it for ESXi data stores and performance seems to be okay so far. We've only had it a couple months. We have it integrated with VMware.

The benefits are the stability and that we're able to contact Dell EMC support for a quick turnaround. We have a higher level of support. If we have issues, they generally get fixed quickly.

Our hope is that they stay up, online, and that we will be able to update them while the data stores are operational. That is why we picked them.

Once it is set up, it is definitely easy to manage.

We've got an ongoing issue with a Unity in which some power supply fans spin up. We've had a whole bunch of hardware changed as a result but I still have an open SR, which has been a struggle. It doesn't seem to affect performance but it's something that we're hoping the engineers can resolve.

We have also had some issues with an upgrade where we can't manage a device, after the upgrade. So we had to have a ticket in for that.

The stability has been fine so far. We're good during normal operations.

In terms of scalability, the size is fine for the environment we have. We're usually at about half the capacity, so we have quite a bit more we can expand with. It's good.

In most situations, tech support works really well. If there are technical logs that they can diagnose and actually pull something out of, fantastic. If there aren't, if it's an abstract sort of issue, like the fan issues we're having, where they cycle every six minutes, it's taken me about six weeks.

They didn't believe me that the environment was not too hot. So they sent a technician out just to make sure that I could read the thermostat, that it was 68 degrees in our office. Then, they sent someone out to reseed each component, which I had already done. I didn't appreciate that part because I did some of those basics. I did exactly what they had said on the phone. The third time, they actually replaced some components and the fourth time they just sent the components to be replaced. It appeared to work, the fan issue did appear to go away, but it came back a couple of weeks later, after an update. I'm not sure if it's update-related, but it came back.

Because I've done the setup before with the VNXe version, it was straightforward. It's very similar to the VNXe.

Licensing has been quite difficult. It doesn't always auto-license. About half the time, when I provision one, I have to contact Service to get a license, or even go to our account manager to help get it straightened out.

Study the configurations of what you need to use and ensure you understand what you're provisioning. The procurement process can be a little daunting because there are a lot of features and there are a lot of components that you'll get set up with but which you may not need.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for me are global, 24-hour support; being able to get things fixed. After that, price, because we'll probably buy a thousand of them over time.

We use it to high-speed all of our SQL Servers.

It increased the boot speed on our SQL Servers. It made downtimes incredibly small compared to when we had them on normal spinning disk. Back then, it would take two or three minutes to boot up. Now, on all-flash, it's 25 to 30 seconds. So it has improved downtime, if we have to reboot a server, which is something we do a lot.

We used to have Exchange on it but we've put that in the cloud so it's no longer on a solution. When we did have it, it was faster because it wasn't on spinning disks. It helped us with that.

Being all-flash makes everything super-fast.

It's also great to manage. That's the easiest part. We also have another SAN, from Pure, and the Unity is easier to manage than the Pure.

Support and licensing are big things, in the end, that needs improvement.

It's very stable. We have not had any issues with it since we put it in. We've had one drive fail in two years. It was easily replaced, a hot swap and done. It has been incredibly easy and been stable for two years.

We have used technical support and I would rate them a massive zero. I put in a ticket, although my preferred contact method is a call. I never receive a call. I send it to my sales engineer, my sales engineer sends it to their manager, the manager tells the guy to give me a call, and he sends me an email. That's not my preferred contact method and, even when complaining, I still get an email.

Also, when I put in a ticket and say, "Here are our logs," they don't read the logs. It even says to do so in the ticket, but they skim over it. Their support has been pretty bad since they became Dell EMC. EMC used to be good. Dell has been horrible forever. I think it's going down that road.

We were using the VNX and the IBM V7000. We needed to move to a new solution because they were slow. There was a little bit of flash in the VNX, and some in the V7000, but the all-flash was just such an improvement that we decided we needed to go to the Unity.

When looking to work with a vendor, the important criteria we look for are nothing too pushy, and having a good relationship, and a continued relationship. It's not good when they just sell and leave. It's always good to continue that communication, make sure we have everything we need.

The fact that it reduces our downtime gives us incredible cost savings. Our industry is agriculture. We do market trading. Seconds are everything that matters. That minute, or the few minutes, that we save can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars. If that happens in the middle of the day, since we are trading constantly, reducing the amount of time that it takes, when something goes down, to get back up is cost savings.

Licensing is a little bit confusing. Going through everything with them, there are a lot of line items to go over. Every single thing is broken down into a line item, and it starts to get really confusing in terms of what we're actually purchasing when it comes to the product.

We looked at Pure. Unity beat out Pure.

Make sure you have all your ducks in a row when you finish. Make sure they understand the type of support that you want, make sure the licensing is clear, make sure it has all the features you want.

The purchasing process was actually incredibly easy. We had a vendor to go through. She was able to clear everything up. When we were trying to look at it ourselves, it was a little bit convoluted. But once we had her help explain it through, it became easier.

They have a good product. It's great for what it does. The surrounding pieces are where everything gets tricky.

We use it for our NAS systems and our SAN systems. On the NAS side, it's used for our end-users' home directories and Departmental shares. On the block side, we use it for VMware storage and we have it integrated with VMware. There was no additional cost for that integration.

We just started doing a bunch of automation where, if an end-user's home directory or Departmental share gets filled, I can set certain things through a Unity API so that if it reaches 95 or 98 percent full, it will automatically expand. Now, instead of our getting a ticket and having to go in and do it manually, it does that for us.

Our end-users are happy with the product, there are no issues.

The product is pretty easy to use. The GUI is nice, really easy to use, and the performance is good. 

For the upgrade from the old system to the new system, if there was a better way to integrate them so I could easily move the data without working all those nights and weekends, that would be nice.

Also, Dell EMC's competitor has a clustering technology. In the next release, it would be nice if they could build that into the product.

The product has been pretty good.

There was one minor issue where we would get these alerts every six hours, but they were fake alerts. We installed a patch a week ago and it fixed the issue. Other than that, no issues, the product has been stable.

We have a Unity 500, which scales to 500 drives, and we're about half full. But it's like their previous systems where you can add a couple of drives or a couple of shelves. There are no issues on that end.

Technical support has always been pretty good. Customer service includes the guys who come in and replace the drives and install the system, and those guys are good too. No issues.

We had the older generation of the Unity system, it was called EMC VNX. It's similar in some ways, but they've definitely improved the GUI, the user interface, and the performance.

When selecting a vendor, a big thing is support. We really need a company that, when something goes wrong, they're there and they can respond immediately, so we don't have to wait a certain amount of time. We experience a little bit of the waiting part with Dell EMC, but we have a technical account manager, and his job is to escalate. Since we already had that with EMC, it made sense to go with Dell EMC. So support would be number one. Number two would be performance, obviously. It has to work well.

The initial setup was pretty easy. We actually have a Dell EMC service engineer who came on site and helped set it up. I had to help in terms of getting all the infrastructure ready, but he did most of the heavy work.

The upgrading experience from our previous solution to this one is definitely better than it was with the VNX product. The only thing that we wished that it had is a way to migrate the data from the old system to the new system. We had to do a manual process for that. To move the data, we had to work a lot of nights and weekends. That was the hardest part of setting it up.

But other than that, it's better in every way.

I get fewer calls at night. That's my ROI.

NetApp and HPE were on our shortlist. HPE support is not good, so we didn't choose them. NetApp does have some good technology, but the relationship that we had with Dell EMC was the reason that we chose them.

In terms of the purchase process, we work with a rep. We have biweekly meetings. They're always on site. We worked with the Dell EMC sales engineer, making sure we got the right kind of drives, the right kind of performance, etc.

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.