Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

It's a replacement for a VNX, it's faster. It has its good points, and it has its bad points.

I don't think it's providing any great enhancements over the existing platform.

There are some features in VNX that I wish were in the Unity. Storage Groups for isolating LANs and hosts. That is a big issue.

We've also encountered an issue when it comes to migrating to compressed LANs on the Unity, and during the Storage vMotion. It appears that the compression algorithm is overwhelmed, and when it becomes overwhelmed it just stops compressing and writes the raw data to the destination. We later copied internally another Storage vMotion to another compressed LAN and achieved much higher compressions on that internal copy. It would be really nice if there was a way to automatically throttle, as a part of a Storage vMotion, to say, "I want to gain the maximum benefits from the compression algorithm, so throttle back the Storage vMotion to implement 100 percent compression."

My colleague has done most of the migration work, but he's also encountered a few other issues in terms of the integration with vCenter. 

It's a box that has a lot of promise, and it was a very shiny new "sports car" when we got it. It has a few dents and scratches in it. That "new car pride," we don't go out and wash it every weekend now. Some of that reality has kicked in. 

I still have expectations, it's an all-flash array, while our VNX, obviously, is not. So we do anticipate, once we've completed the migration and get more experienced with it and maybe with some code upgrades, improvements to some of the attributes, that it will do a good job for us.

We went from the VNX, where we had about 900 spinning disks, to 27 solid-state disks. There have been no failures in the last year.

It had better scale, it costs a lot of money. I definitely think it will. Also, my hope, being that it is solid-state, is that the ongoing maintenance costs will be reduced, on the off chance that our firm might not want to replace it after five years.

Tech support is good. We've always had our struggles over the years with their support. I characterize their level-one support as being somewhat questionable. But if stuff hits the fan and you have to get up to level two or three, you have a priority-one, they always come through.

I really like the true unified storage box.

We use it as block storage. We are hosting Video on Demand Service and it is doing pretty well. Previously, VNX required separate hardware to support file based storage which is not required anymore.

To the best of my knowledge, migration from VNX to Unity without VPLEX/RecoverPoint is not available right now. If Dell/EMC will do this, then I would give them a rating of 10/10.

We have used it for seven months.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10.

We used to deploy VNX5200. We moved to a new box due to technology improvements.

The initial setup was straightforward. We present our all storage to EMC VPLEX and then VPLEX presents the storage to hosts.

Pricing is relatively good compared to other vendors with the same specifications.

We have compared HPE 3PAR, Huawei OceanStor, and Lenovo Storage.

For greater efficiency, use SSD, SAS, and NL-SAS with FAST.

Use at least 10-20% SSD of whole storage, 20-30% of SAS, and the rest with NL-SAS. This will give you good performance as well as provide you with a cost-effective solution.

We are customers of Dell and I'm head of the team.

I like that you can add volume and it is automatically registered in VMware. It's easy to integrate XT with other solutions.

It's not a feature, but I'd like to see licensing costs reduced. 

I've been using this solution for a year. 

The solution is stable. 

I haven't tried scaling it because my work is a fixed requirement but it seems to be scalable.

I previously worked with Sequel Logic and a little with NetApp. We switched because it was a natural upgrade. I don't think either of those solutions is better than XT. I like it a lot although I think Unity does a pretty decent job as well.

The initial setup was straightforward and I think it took a couple of days. 

I think everything is overpriced in the storage area so it's difficult to know what reasonable means for these products. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

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.

Dell EMC Unity XT is used for virtualization storage mainly with very few files and very little power consumption. We have on-premise deployment on our own organization. We have two Dell EMC Unity XT, and four IBM FlashSystems for our own consumption.  

Nowadays we implement Dell EMC Unity XT less and implement more Dell PowerStore solutions.

Dell EMC Unity XT has good integration with VMware.

I have been using Dell EMC Unity XT for many years.

Dell EMC Unity XT is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 120 users using this solution when combining all the customers we have. If our capacity requirements increase we would be increasing the use of this solution.

The support from Dell EMC Unity XT is very good here in South Africa. It is important for us. 

The initial installation is straightforward and took approximately one hour. However, the full process was not as simple as IBM. 

I am certified to do the implementation of the solution.

There is a license required to use this solution, but it is a one-time purchase.

The price of the solution should be less expensive. However, at some point, you need to pay for facility and performance.

I have evaluated Pure Storage.

I would recommend this Dell EMC Unity XT to others. Overall it is a stable versatile solution.

I rate Dell EMC Unity XT an eight out of ten.

Our Unity arrays are our primary storage arrays for both of our data centers. We run all our VMs on there, they're all-flash. They've been running great. We've had no problems with them. Fantastic.

The fact it's all-flash is why we chose it. The speed increase, therefore, that we've experienced from it has been great.

Obviously its speed is the main reason why we got it but we've really loved being able to use the interface. We've been able to create LUNs easily. We're able to get in there and create what we need, do everything we need to do, configure it the way it needed to be configured.

In terms of simplicity of ownership, it was almost plug-and-go. We did have some help getting it set up but, as for licensing and being able to get support through Dell EMC's site, it has been really easy. The interface makes it really easy to manage.

There could always be improvements to the UI. For what we've been using it for it's been great, but there are always little tweaks that could happen there.

It's been very stable. We haven't had any issues. I think we had a drive go out and it was quick to alert us and they made sure that we got it replaced without any failures. Everything has been great.

We haven't had to do any expansion on it yet, but I've heard that it's very easy and that, if we ever need it, it shouldn't be a problem.

We've used the technical support. They've been great. They have a good system to alert you when there's an issue. They've been quick to get us the drives that we need.

The initial setup wasn't too bad. They delivered it. We got the software installed, the OS installed, and got it all configured. It was just a matter of setting up the LUNs. We had a little bit of help with that but it was not difficult.

My advice is, obviously, to go with something tailored to your needs. For what this has been, a full flash array and ease of setup, from what I've had experience with, I would probably recommend the Unity array.

We plan to eventually use the VMware integration. There is a little bit that we're using right now but it's not the whole vSAN setup. I don't believe there will be a cost involved with that. It's just a matter of taking the time and getting it set up. Right now, we just have it set up as a simple SAN array.

Nothing is ever perfect. It would have to be perfect to be a ten out of ten, but this is probably as close as we've been to perfect, so that's good.

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.

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.