Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We are a medical center, so we have a very diverse ecosystem. We do a lot of imaging, which is our primary use case.

It is performing very well.

It has helped us be able to use less administrators per device or system. Therefore,we are more streamlined.

The management is key. This is where we see the functionality and ease of use. To be programmatically administered is huge, it is one of the key features that we like about it. My team finds it easy to manage.

We have integrated it with vSphere.

• The interface is easy to use.
• The ability to programmatically manage it.

It needs more functionality and the ability to move across more landscapes.

Stability is rock solid.

We haven't found a scale that we can't go to yet.

Historically, we are a Dell shop. We actually asked Dell's solution experts to come in and give us a suggestion of where we needed to go before purchasing this solution.

Our big return of investment is the ability to scale and not add FTE counts nor extra administration.

It was easy to order. We are a big Dell shop, so it was easy to purchase and get it in place, then up and running.

Find out what your use case is. Look at it across the board. Dell EMC has been good to us as a customer.

It is for users of VDI solutions.

• We use it to implement all our VDI solutions.
• It is easy to deploy and manage.
• We were able to integrate it very quickly with other solutions.

• Cheaper
• Its consumption of kVA

I would like to see more compression and deduplication added to the solution. Today, our compression is about 2:1 and other solutions give us about 4:1 or 5:1.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is good.

Ordering is easy, but the processing site and working with those companies was difficult.

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.

We are using it as a storage unit. We also using it at my customer site.

It is the storage provider that the company is using. The product is easy to manage.

It provides SAN capabilities and storage replication.

• The user interface could use improvement.
• They could move away from flash and make it an HTML5 file. 
• They should update to the cloud.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

The technical support is very professional and provides quick responses. 

When using the callback function, we found it to be good. It is also good for creating cases. 

I haven't experienced anything bad with the support yet.

I was not involved with the initial setup. I haven't worked with it that long.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: good support and fair price.

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.

We're using it to host development workloads and it's performing as expected.

Dell EMC Unity XT is cheap and deep storage. It fits the business need that we had. I'm sure there are a number of other products out on the market that compete just as well.

One of the most valuable features is its cost. It was inexpensive compared to other arrays that we were looking at.

It's also easy to manage. I have 20 years of managing EMC storage and it has been the same from day one, pretty much.

We have also integrated it with vSphere and SQL. There were no costs involved outside of our normal workload licensing, no costs that were specific to the Unity platform.

It does what we bought it for. I don't know that there's anything else that it needs to do that we're not leveraging from it already. From a product perspective, I don't see any room for improvement.

From a service perspective, they can do nothing but go uphill.

One to three years.

It runs. It operates. Developers can do their development work. It's not screaming-fast, but it doesn't fall down when you bring up a workload. So it's performing as expected.

We did encounter a firmware bug which actually caused loss of data. There was some heartburn around that. But in general, it has operated as expected, except for that bug. Fortunately, we found the bug in pre-production, so we didn't lose anything that we needed. However, had it been in production, we'd be having a very different conversation about Unity.

I can't really comment on scalability. We bought the frame fully loaded. I don't know whether it scales or not. I suppose if I bought a unit that had half the capacity, it would scale to the max capacity. That wasn't my need.

Technical support has gotten progressively worse. In the past 24 months, give or take, the amount of attention from Dell EMC support for flagship products, both the Unity platform - which replaced VNX - and their VMAX platform: Their support teams and R&D have gone down under the Dell regime.

Our customer service, our support, the engineers that we get on the phone, the hassles that we put up with at level-one and level-two, didn't exist three or four years ago with EMC. We paid a premium for EMC products and you got a premium service as part of that investment. We don't get that anymore.

Set up went flawlessly.

Generally, with these types of products, there is not really much documentation from the build and configure perspective. There's a config sheet that you work on with your SE team. But it's not like going out and getting a packaged product from a Best Buy and implementing. There is an expectation from the config sheet for fiber connections, network connections, speeds and feeds, and the like. That is enterprise-class architecture. That's out-of-the-box. 

Dell EMC came in and did the implementation. They were knowledgeable.

I didn't put together an ROI for this product. We had a fixed budget that we wanted to invest in storage for development teams. This fit the bill.

Pricing was competitive compared to other products on the market. Among the ones we considered, Unity came in with the best price.

Compared to other EMC platforms, Unity is nice because it is all-inclusive, in terms of the licensing model. That's unique for them, compared to other manufacturers. It is beneficial. We could use replication, native, right out-of-the-box.

We looked at NetApp, Infinidat, Pure. 

My advice is: Stay up to date on code.

Regarding the purchasing process, we went through a VAR and it was easy. Once pricing was established, the bill of materials was defined, we paid for the product, and it showed up.

In terms of important criteria when selecting a vendor, from an executive perspective, it's partnership. From my team's perspective, it's probably 

• usability
• performance
• stability.

I want it up, I want it to stay up, and I don't want to have to manage it.

I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. It's not an all-flash array so it's not the fastest thing on the market. But the stability has been good, minus the initial bug. It does what we ask of it.

Our use case is very unique. We just need it in our offices.

It used to be a complex product. Now, it is becoming simpler. 

Overall, the feedback from my team has definitely been positive.

• Its simplicity and simple management. 
• Auto-features for data protection.
• Being able to expand the product.
• The Unisphere management interface: We are very familiar with it. It manages all the EMC devices that we have. Management is easy because it is part of Unisphere, which is self-learning.
• The support for Dell EMC is excellent.

I would like to see a more seamless virtual box integration with the physical box which can replicate, because the setup of the replication is very difficult right now. We tried it multiple times, and while the physical box is easy, when we mixed it with a virtual edition and it seemed very complex. We been trying this for several months, even with the cabling included. We are still working on it.

No issues so far. It is very stable.

It is scalable. We can always add additional tools if we need to expand it. 

We had been using VNX for a long time that it is now a part of our lifecycle. We introduced Dell EMC Unity into our environment to replace the VNX.

We contact our VAR, get a quote, and order all the hardware. Then, they ship and install it with a Dell EMC engineer. It is very straightforward.

We can see improvement since moving to the inclusive licensing.

The Dell EMC Data Protection license covers everything, like a one stop shop. All our options are covered. 

We have worked with different vendors. However, right now, we are sticking with Dell EMC Unity as it seems like it is a very solid, mature product.

Do your homework. Obtain all the use cases. See what license you need and purchase the license as part of your preparation. Then, the process will be smooth.

We do integration with vSphere, but it is very limited because we outsource with IBM. 

We use it for storage for our ESXi hosts at our smaller sites.

It increased our uptime because we switched from physical stuff to virtual stuff, and being able to have that we could do the high-availability and failover.

I like the ease of configuration, the quick setup, and the fact that it seems to be hardened. We haven't had any issues with them. In terms of simplicity of ownership, once they're running you don't have to touch them.

They're also simple to manage. We came from the VNXe 3200s so it's very similar.

We integrated it with vSphere but that integration was "iffy". It was okay but we had a few challenges with it.

It's very solid. No issues at all. The only issue we have is that the power supply ramps up and down and makes some noise on SPA. But other than that being a nuisance, we haven't had any reliability issues at all.

Scaling is easy. Just add drives, extend the space. It's super simple.

We called them and put in a service ticket on the power supply issue. We tried a few things and then they sent us another one, but other than that we haven't had any issues. They've been easy to work with.

The initial setup was straightforward. Coming from the VNXe's, it was almost identical, just has a different GUI platform. It was very easy.

The price is up a little bit from what we used to pay so I'm hoping that it's a little bit of a better system than the VNXe was. But I still think it's a good value. It's new, so I'm sure there's room for the pricing to drop.

We did have an issue with licensing once but we were able to reach out to the licensing group and do an online chat. They helped instantly, so that was nice.

My advice is to follow the installation guide, it's pretty straightforward, step-by-step.

In terms of the purchasing process, after we had figured out what we wanted, it became easy. But we had to get into our first set of standards. The first one that we ordered had the SFP module cards in it, which we didn't need. We just use the 10-gigabit copper. After figuring out our standard template, it has become super simple every time.

What I look for when selecting a vendor to work with is somebody who

• is big
• guarantees their product
• has good support; somebody who is going to answer their phone 24/7.

So far, I rate the Unity a nine out of 10. It has been easy to set up, we've only had a few small issues. Once they're set up, they're running, you don't have to touch them. The one point I held back is because we're new to them. The version we're using is the 300 and it's also new out there so there has been a little bit of a struggle here and there with some small things; for example, the fans ramping up and we have one right now that's not responding after updates.

It fits what we're trying to do. It has everything and more. There are some features that we're not even using yet.