Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

It's our storage solution. We have a Dell EMC Unity 400. The performance is great.

The fact that it's hybrid is the most valuable feature. We have the SSD so we put our SharePoint on there and some of the stuff that requires a little more speed. For SharePoint, we want the pages to respond a little more quickly. And it's nice to be able to use the slower storage for stuff that we don't need as quickly, like file servers. If they're a little slow, it's okay, nobody really complains. Overall, the hybrid is what we really like about it.

I like that when you log in it gives you a dashboard of what your storage looks like. Pretty cool with that.

In the dashboard there could be notification of duplicate files and the like, so we don't have to rely on Windows to do that. They have all the files in the Dell EMC so that would help us out.

I haven't had any issues with it at all. The stability has been very good.

Dell EMC is one of the best in terms of scalability. They can just add another component to it. It's so modular so it's super easy. The scalability is very nice.

We had a year's worth of support from them when we first bought it. They were very responsive, whether via email or phone calls. We could get a tech onsite if we wanted to, to help us with the installation.

We had Tintri before. It was good, it's also a very simple solution. The problem was that they got too expensive, once you tried to scale up with them. They quoted us something like $800,000. We said to ourselves, "Um, let's go to Dell EMC. We know Dell, we know EMC, so let's just switch."

In the industry in which we work, a lot of people use Dell EMC and there weren't a lot of Tintri users. Being able to reach out to somebody in another company who uses Dell EMC makes that partnership with everyone a lot easier too.

Setting it up was super easy, as is the management of it. We used the same thing for setting up a disaster site and it was pretty seamless.

I don't know an actual number for ROI but, especially because we are a small IT shop, having something that is easy, that doesn't take a lot of time to set up, monitor, and manage helps us a ton. We can focus on other things.

When you look at what Dell EMC is compared to, like NetApp, they're all priced pretty similarly. I think the pricing of the hybrid model is good. Obviously, we would want cheaper prices but you can't get everything.

My advice would be to use their support. If you bought it, have them come onsite, have them help you set it up, make sure you get comfortable with it. If you bought the support have someone come onsite. It's like free training. Don't wing it.

Primary use case is block and file. It's like a combo device. It has performed well, except for the migration process.

It requires a lot less management.

• All-flash performance
• Snapshotting capabilities
• Replication

It's good. It has a lot of good features.

I think there are a couple of things on the file side that we're lacking from the VNX world. It would be nice if we got some of those back. I think there are limitations on how many file systems you can back up at a time. Whereas you can do, I believe, eight continuous per data mover on the file side on the VNX, you can only do something like two or four on Unity. If they could step up to that, that would be good.

It was difficult at first. It wasn't very stable. It was crashing a lot. I think we were early adopters and, during the file side of migration, it crashed a number of times.

Scalability is good, although we only have a 400F. I think we missed out on getting the 450, but it seems to be fairly scalable.

Tech support is good. Just like most of the EMC products, there is a knowledgeable staff.

Setup was fairly straightforward, although we had EMC onsite to give us a hand.

The important criteria for us when selecting a vendor are

• relationship
• quality of product.

I would rate the Unity between seven and eight out of 10. It's not quite at the level of what the VNX was, but it's one of those products that is improving with time.

I would definitely recommend you look at Unity.

It's a tier-two storage array. The performance is okay.

The all-flash array and the compression ratio are benefiting us. We still have to migrate a couple of systems. We are still in the process of doing it and we'll know better afterward. But, we've seen some good improvements. For example, we put it on one of the file servers and the backup performance improved quite a lot.

It has the same operating system for both file and block, and it actually simplifies everything. It's much smaller compared to VNX.

I have just been to one of the briefing sessions, here at the Dell EMC World 2018 conference, and they released a very cool feature, Snapshot replication, which is very interesting. I'm excited about that.

Stability seems to be good but we had some issues recently because of a bug in the system. We were presenting LANs to the Unity array but I think it caused a disruption to the host. EMC did acknowledge it and provided an alternative way to do it. We felt that this could have been avoided. It caused downtime to the host on two occasions.

Scalability for the 650F is good, but I was expecting a little bit more than that.

Technical support was helpful. I would have appreciated it if it were a lot faster, but we got a resolution for our issue.

We come from VNX, and we also have VMAXs.

When selecting a vendor we look at the 

• performance 
• scalability
• price.

First of all, it should meet the business requirements such as performance, and it should be compatible with all applications. Then we will look at the third factor which is the price.

Regarding advice, it depends on the size of the business. Unity, price per Gig, is actually a good system. In fact, I'm thinking of moving some of the old VMAX arrays to Unity because of the price performance per Gig. If the stability makes sense, then I'm actually going to move it.

We had a stand-alone storage system and we wanted to purchase a Metro Cluster system. We looked at other companies and we found EMC was the best of them. That's why we choose them.

At the moment it's a cluster, we use it in different data centers. In case of any interruption, a power cut or something, our data will be continuously available.

At the moment we are using it with VPLEX. VPLEX is a very big advantage for us. We don't use very many of the Unity's functions. But it does provide good provisioning, allowing us to save space. We use all-flash systems and they are quite fast.

The monitoring part could be better. With EMC storage systems - or Unity and VPLEX, because I'm using them, for the moment - the monitoring part is very difficult. They should improve this to have a better reporting system.

The stability is quite okay. We have not had any downtime with the Unity. We have only been using it for three months. We have just finished the migrations, but so far it is working quite well.

For us, it's scalable.

Setup was very easy.

When selecting a vendor, as a technical guy, it's the power or bandwidth, the technical details, that are more important to me.

I would definitely tell a colleague to go for Unity.

The main use case for my clients is for mid-range storage performance. It's primarily all-flash arrays. It's always with two sides replicated. It's working well.

The architecture is robust. I know that it has changed a lot with the advent of the all-flash. But it was the good, old-fashioned storage array, block array for customers. It's reliable.

The feedback I have is it's quite stable. We have a configuration with VPLEX. The issues are not coming from the Unity itself, in general. It's more about the SAN or the VPLEX, the virtualization layer. On that specific point, I'd say the Unity is doing well. It's reliable.

The market I'm working, in Switzerland, is quite small. The Unity, in terms of scalability, covers 90% of our use cases.

Replication with VMware - it's called the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster - is lacking in the Unity and is present in Compellent. In general, that's a key decision metric. If we need to have synchronous replication... That's why we had to use VPLEX, because it's not in the Unity. Look out for this. If that kind of setup is not required, you should always go for Unity.

We use the Unity as the SAN for our data center. It's where all of our data lives right now, for our main office. It has exceeded our expectations.

We have simplified it down to where we're using one storage pool inside the Unity, whereas on the VNX, we had multiple storage pools. This has simplified that aspect for us. It would depend on each organization. We're heavy into VMware and this ties into it so simply. It's made it a lot easier for us.

We're very familiar with the VNX series, we were using VNX before Unity. The features sets are very similar but what I like is the way it ties into VMware. When I create a datastore inside Unity, it just shows up in VMware. I love that tie-in.

Stability is excellent. We have never had downtime with Unity.

Scalability is great. We haven't scaled up very much, but it's definitely easy to do.

We have only had to use technical support for firmware upgrades. They are helpful.

We were using VNX. Our Dell rep stays in touch with us fairly often. He keeps us knowledgeable about things that are up and coming and what might be a good fit for us. The business makes the decision. 

When looking at a vendor what's important are 

• price
• support
• the product.

Price is definitely going to be a factor. More than that, you want something that's solid. You're going to pay a little bit more for something that performs better and is more efficient at what it does, makes your life easier.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We're probably going to go away from the Unity and end up using VxRail and vSan. Hyperconvergence is all the rage, that is where everything is going, so that's where we're headed. We need the hyperconverged, we need the elasticity - that we can spin things up and spin them down quickly and easily. We can't do that right now.

I would definitely steer a colleague towards Unity if they were looking at that versus NetApp, for example.

We had old systems - CX4-960 and Celerra - and we wanted to consolidate the systems to the Unity platform for the customer because the old systems were very expensive for maintenance.

The only reason we made this move was to save costs, to be honest.

It's easy to handle for administrators and it's a unified system. It's not as complex as Celerra systems or CX4 Clariions to administrate. You can do everything with one GUI.

In the next release, I would like to see stable performance on AIX. AIX are mostly mission-critical systems, so the support has to be there.

We have had a lot of issues. We've got massive issues at the moment with IBM AIX. It's not stable. We have a lot of disk errors, production crashes sometimes, and that's not good for a retailer.

Also, we still have to administer the Celerra because we have massive issues with the filer system of Unity. We hope it gets better with the 4.2 or 4.3 release. We do not have the integration for connection to Centara. This means we have to keep the data on Celerra and cannot migrate to Unity.

Scalability is not good. We have a Unity 300, now we have to do a data-in-place conversion for the next upgrade because only 150 slots are supported, not drives, only slots. So my job next week is to do an in-place upgrade from 300 to 400.

The setup was complex but it was one of the first Unity systems in Germany. We sold it in August two years ago.

If you plan to use Unity as a filer system take a bigger controller because with the 300 and 400 you have performance issues compared with other filer systems. For pure filer systems, I would recommend an Isilon or NetApp, or something like that. Unity is a unified solution, if you have to do unified, but it's better to separate if you have more data.

Primary use case is mid-range to low-end storage, and it performs very well for that type of operation.

We just recently put together a large customer deal. They're going to use Unity's for applications at remote sites, so it's essentially a robo operation. Its main advantage over vSAN was the rebuild, the intelligence of the restoration in the event of a hardware drive failure and, of course, the all-flash solution.

The flexibility of the paradigm and, obviously, its price point.

I'd like to see more of the NVMe back-end for the flash. And the big deal with the PowerMax is that they've used all U2 drives so that they can avoid having to take it down. I see using M.2 and modular sections as being a real nice alternative that could be implemented in Unity at a fairly low cost.

Obviously, we haven't had it in the field for years, but we haven't had any problems with it and we've deployed close to 150 of them.

It's not really scalable. Up to mid-range requirements, it's just fine. But scalability takes you to the enterprise-class, and that's more high-end VNX or low-end Symmetrix.

We've used technical support but it wasn't Unity's fault, it was the customer's. The tech support is very good.

Setup is simple.

For our applications, we'd rate Unity at eight out of 10. It would be a 10 if it had a lower cost. That's really the issue. The value point is, once you get into the Unity spectrum, you're looking at a lot of competitive offerings, and they're appealing to a limited class requirement, so the demands are not as stringent.

In terms of advice, find out what your storage group's expertise level is and their background, and then see if they don't already have experience with Unity or one of the others in the family. It seems to be a natural fit that way.