Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

General storage for virtual machines. The virtual machines have different roles, essential roles; and, of course, mission-critical servers running financial services, or engineering programs, etc.

I have a client that jumped from the stone age to hybrid. They do enjoy the hybrid storage, the fast cache, etc. It has greatly improved their performance, absolutely. The customer is really happy about it.

It is the performance combined with the Gig-per-dollar value. That combination is superior to other storage options.

All the features that the client has, the client has really enjoyed them.

One thing they could do is lower the price point. There are other storage products that are available from Dell, the SE series for example. The client is comparing the Unity and the SE3000 for example, the SE is cheaper.

So far so good. No issues with stability.

I'm sure scalability will be fine. It will be great. But the client has not reached the point of needing to increase the capacity, or other features, yet.

So far technical support is very reliable, it's very good that way. We haven't engaged tech support so far, but when did the deployment we did have Dell EMC come in and provide deployment services, and that went through pretty well.

We picked Dell deployment services, so it was very straightforward. The Dell technician came in on time and then, according to the survey that the client filled out earlier - it was great. The client was impressed.

I give it an eight out of 10 and the two missing points are because of the price tag.

In terms of advice, I would definitely recommend Dell solutions. As for Unity, it depends on the budget. I definitely recommend Unity, because I do have clients that are currently using it, and they don't have any issues, they're happy with the product.

As a partner, we are able to deploy it across multiple industries: healthcare, government, small business. We install Unity everywhere. There is really no one, set, niche customer that we do it for.

• Starting small and being able to grow to a larger scale
• All-flash options are great
• Hybrid options are good for certain use cases

The code revisions. I think that they could do a better job of testing on the back-end, for the code revisions. I've heard of some issues down the line where people have upgraded to the latest code and there were bugs in it, and they had to release a subsequent code fix. More testing on the Dell EMC side, for when they release those code revisions, would be a good idea.

It is stable. I have not personally seen any issues when deploying in a customer environment.

Technical support has gotten worse since the merger, for example, response time to SR creation. And mainly, if I ask for a solution, they'll send me a white paper and say, "Here, just do it, here's a KB article." They seem to be more hands-off, and they just want to let the customer or the partner deal with it.

Another big thing that is somewhat upsetting is that they got rid of partner support, installation support. We really liked that. Being a partner and installing, if we run into issues while on site, with doing any type of work, we don't have a number to call anymore, a direct line. We have to go through the same process, and that process is terrible, still.

Most of the customers that I have are old VNX customers, and they want to replace their VNX with the latest and greatest, so they go to Unity. The Unity is a VNXE but on steroids. That's the main use that I see, just part of a refresh cycle, and they want to refresh with the Unity's.

It's very simple to set up. No issues with the setup.

Nothing is ever a perfect 10 in my book, so I would say this solution is a seven. I think there is room for improvement, there is always going to be room for improvement, especially in IT. Having a perfect 10 in any IT hardware platform, I don't it think that exists right now.

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.

We are a titanium partner. We deliver the full solution portfolio that Dell and Dell EMC have.

It can be simple to deploy, the standup time is quite quick. The interface is quite quick. The terms are simple, intuitive, it's similar what was there in the VNXE before it. It's very simple to navigate and administer from the console. 

The hardware itself, it differs from Compellent and differs from the VNX before it. It doesn't have a separate file harbor that goes with it, there are no separate NAS heads. It's 2U, you have file and block storage, so you get a quite a lot of services for a small footprint.

It's not as reliable as it should be, I think it was probably released a little early. We've had production problems with customers, and there are still some challenges at scale as well.

Compression is a problem for the system. Once you enable dedupe and compression, the performance of the system, the capability, halves. Customers don't necessarily realize that, and they can't get as much out of the system as they initially thought. It has to be right-sized and sized for compression, but even with that, because there are only two storage processors, you're ending up at almost 40 percent usage.

Tech support has taken a downturn since the acquisition, and that's not just for the Unity. The skill, the people, the engineers, some of them have been let go. Their talent has been let go, so the overall support is another challenge we're dealing with on an ongoing basis.

It's quite easy to deploy, there is no problem there. The system itself is good as well, the offering is good. You can have file and block without any extra harbor for file.

I would like to see the new system come out very quickly - that merges Compellent and Unity - and let's get rid of these problems and focus the engineering group on one system. To me, that's the quickest route to success. They need to get off the pot for one of them and take the good. Don't necessarily discard the code. There are some good features in both, so they really need to get back to an engineering focus, like EMC of old.

I would give the Unity a five out of 10. The offering is good. The simple console is good. The deployment is good. Support is not good. The compression performance capability is not good. Problems with I/O modules, with bugs that came out that really should have been caught before the product was released. And I have a problem with the confusion in the market between the two systems, between Compellent and Unity. The quicker a mid-range solution comes out combining the two products, the better.

The biggest improvement is the data reduction for the organization. That is where they see the better TCO and improved ROI for their existing footprint. That's the biggest advantage for the businesses that are using the Unity platform.

The features that customers are looking for, because I do a lot of architecture work, is the management simplicity. The provisioning is very simple in the Unity platform, as well as the reporting structure back to the customer. They get to know end-to-end visibility in the system environment.

Inline dedup compression security is coming up as an issue, encryption is key for our customers. If we could have more ways to do software-based encryption, those are the features customers are asking us for, as well as replication.

The maturity level of the Unity is getting better and better as we speak. The latest and greatest cores are becoming more stable than the previous one. EMC is doing a lot of investment in research and development. They're getting better and better.

It is scalable. Customers are going more into distributed architecture, so the Unity definitely  has a scalable architecture built into that. Scale-out architecture, scale-up architecture.

There is a lot of room for improvement on the support side, because of the response time. I'm giving the customer feedback. Customers are coming to me as their architect, as a level-1, level-2, they're asking me. The response from the EMC is not there yet. We are sending the same feedback back to EMC, to improve the support line.

We started with the VNX platform. I have a very good understanding of the EMC portfolio from Centera, from NS, VNX, VNXE, and then VMAX.

Setup is very easy. Absolutely. It's easy to build the environment. That has improved a lot.

At the end of the day, the licensing cost is key, because every customer has a pain point, that the cost of each piece is high. So if we can bundle everything in a package, that is how the competitors are selling their footprint. For example, Pure, if you buy a box, everything comes with the box. So, in a similar fashion, if we can do anything along those lines, it will be better for the customer.

I give it an eight out of 10, because there is definitely room for improvement, for EMC to invest in it.

For Unity, our use case is mostly test and dev.

Compared to older generations of arrays there is quite an improvement, compared to the older VNXs, for example. It depends on you use it, but for our purposes, we find Unity simple to use.

It's simple, easy to manage.

At the moment, we are pretty satisfied with it. Perhaps the user interface could be better.

It's more stable than the old generation of arrays. We had a lot of issues with the VNX, for example, but they got better over time. The VNX2 was better, and the Unity has been even more stable.

For our use cases, I believe it will meet our needs moving forward.

Tech support is very good. We haven't had many of serious issues, and the issues we have had have been dealt with very well.

The setup was straightforward. We set most of the configuration ourselves. If you have basic knowledge then it's pretty straightforward.

We did compare it to others at the time, but they have a wide selection of tools and products to meet our use cases. Good support as well.

It can improve your TCO. When you buy a Unity box, you can consolidate a lot in a very small frame. You can save energy and, if you're arranging a room for your equipment, it can help you reduce costs in tiles and flooring, energy, and so on. It is pretty easy to use, so your storage admins don't have to put a lot of effort into managing it. It's easy and practical to use.

I like the idea that it can compress and dedupe inline. That is quite a stunning feature for mid-range customers. That is something that is much better than the expectation that we have with VNX, which does that post-processing, and is not recommended for databases. So it's a big step for Unity. When we position Unity, that is one of the first things we say, that it is prepared to work things inline with dedupe and compress.

I believe this product lacks some things that are extremely valuable for customers, especially VNX customers. The NAS capabilities of Unity - I have to say there are a lot of things I miss. For example, deduplication for hybrid. I have tons of customers with VNX and dedupe. These customers achieve around 50% dedupe efficiency and they mostly use them for archive. If you're talking about 50TB of NAS, which is stored in a 25TB repository, which is very economical, and you can not provide that in a Unity hybrid box, you have problems. That has caused us a lot of problems. 

The other problem I have with the NAS capabilities in Unity is the WORM feature. We were working with a government company that has a public bid and they were buying storage for 13 remote sites. All of them required WORM. Since this is a government customer they took two years or so to establish the project. And they required the WORM feature to securely store records, and they had to be unmodified records. They bought that the idea and they implemented a NAS solution that was going to be consulted by an Oracle Database. They had to buy VMX because Unity didn't have WORM. That would be the most important thing. It's very problematic.

Migrating from VNX to Unity was not so straightforward in the beginning. You could not migrate NAS servers from CIFs. They began with NFS. they recently added CIF support. So, lots of problems there.

I would say it is stable now. Of course, the first releases had some issues but I believe it is fine now.

Peru is a very different market from the U.S. or Europe. A company that is mid-range in the U.S., for instance, could be using an enterprise solution in Peru. For Latin America in general, it is a perfect product for mid-range and for some enterprise-grade, big, transactional businesses.

Technical support is pretty good. It always has been. In Peru, we have a senior engineer that has been with the company for 32 years. He has a lot of knowledge. We have three field engineers. For a small business, like the Peruvian one, it's more than enough, because these machines never fail. You just turn it on and that's it.

We had some issues installing these machines at the beginning, but overall it is really easy. It's done exactly the way the manual says.

I would rate Unity a seven out of 10. I know these products since Clariion, and I believe they hit a great peak with VNX2. It was a product customers loved. When Unity arrived, the ability to consolidate NAS and SAN in a 2U box was pretty cool. But the NAS part didn't follow. That's why I give it a seven.

I think that EMC has a good name in the market. VNX was a great product, and Unity is seen as the natural replacement. Customers see that as an advantage of the Unity. 

VNX used to have some features that Unity still doesn't have. From that perspective, the progress is not that advanced, at least compared to what customers might expect.

We hear from our customers that it is stable. The other thing that customers say is that it's easy to manage. But, as I previously said, I think it has some things that are not ready yet and they are being announced for the next releases, such as inline compression and deduplication, IP replication, synchronous replication. VNX used to have these but Unity, not yet so. But we have good feedback about the product.

For our market, in Argentina, Unity is, most of the time, a good product, a big product. It is unlikely our customers would be short of on the number of drives or IOPS with the Unity. We don't have huge enterprises compared to the American market, for example. Unity is enough for our market's scalability. With the biggest products in the Unity line, we cover pretty much every customer and, if not, we start talking about VNX; but only for a couple of the biggest companies in Argentina. We are a small market.

Sometimes our customers are switching from an installed base of a competitors' solution, for example, IBM, or HPE. Some are users of VNX and are migrating to Unity.

EMC is the leader in the storage market so our customers see that, of course. Maybe they trust more in Unity than, for example, Compellent, because it is a product that comes from EMC. At least in Argentina, it is seen that way. Maybe Compellent products are good, but Dell's storage name is not the best.

I don't do setups myself. But I've heard that it's standard, it's not that complex. In a couple of weeks, the program is fully configured.

I would rate it a seven out of 10, mostly because of what I mentioned already, the features that aren't ready yet that previous products had. I think it is seen as not that mature. That's why it could be better. Maybe they should have stayed with the VNX until Unity was ready to be the natural replacement, and seen as the next step. I don't think that they can show big improvements in the Unity compared to what the VNX was.