Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We did a one-month exercise with EMC. We are trying to replace several systems, like NAS and some file shares, put them into one consolidated system. We do have VDI. We're going to re-use it for VDI, so this is the perspective we're trying to evolve toward.

We're replacing legacy hardware and hardware that is going out of support, and we are consolidating two or three systems into one. We also do have some special security requirements that Unity can meet.

The NAS capability is mainly what we're looking for from this product, and being able to recover fast in DR.

I don't think at this stage we have a specific concern. They have answered most of our concerns in terms of scalability and being future-proof.

We actually haven't tested it yet.

I believe it is scalable.

Dell EMC is actually one of the strategic vendors we work with, so they have quite a big presence at our bank. We meet with them at least once every two weeks.

I believe the setup is going to be straightforward because they have this tool that migrates the data seamlessly, and you don't have any system downtime. I believe it is called Datadobi. It takes out all your data from one system to another and makes it seamless.

Most of the infrastructure we have is from Dell EMC, so we're locked in with Dell but that's fine. If you're happy with the specific product and vendor, why change?

Most of our customers buy it for data storage for the ERP that they use in their businesses. Most of them have a preference for the flash model.

All of them are very satisfied with the performance. It's very good equipment. Our customers give us very good feedback about it, they are very satisfied.

It's very easy to manage the whole system. We can put all the virtualized servers in one place, so they can share and manage the devices very easily.

It is very high-speed. The compression is also a very good feature, and the deduplication as well.

No complaints about the stability. Our customers are very happy with it.

Most of our customers are medium-sized businesses. My market, my targets, they don't need high-scale performance. But I know the scalability is very good and you can scale very easily.

The TCO is very good. Our customers invest and they get a good return.

When selecting a vendor, I choose the storage to fit the value and budget that the customer can afford. I can set most of them up with Unity, but sometimes I need to give them something with a lower cost. Sometimes, the price point is a little bit high in our market.

Unity is equipment that, if you sell it, you don't have any headaches with it. It's very good, its performance is very good. We are very satisfied.

Storage.

I didn't choose this solution. My boss picked the solution. I actually suggested something else from a different vendor. Personally, my opinion of it is there aren't a lot of great features with it.

There are plenty of areas for improvement. 

They can improve on the speed. 

They can improve on the dedupe features, because right now, if you're using certain functionalities, certain criteria, it doesn't dedupe. It's very limited in one sense, while other vendors dedupe on primary, on critical tier-1 data.

You get support, but sometimes you have to sit there and try to fight through tier-1 just to get to tier-2, to get the correct support, to get particular items corrected. Sometimes it's a battle just to fight through support to get the right people. Most of the time, their first-level support is not very technical, so they tend to give you a page number out of their administration guide, which they call their instruction booklet, and they have you read it. I already have the admin guide. I don't need to read it. I need someone to help me because my system is down. I have a production environment that's very critical.

16 months.

It is stable. I give it that. I have had no issues such as where it just decides to take a vacation or drop dead. I've never had that happen. It's pretty stable. 

It is limited to a certain amount of terabytes. We haven't reached that threshold yet. 

As I said above, when you call, their support is a little light on the "tech. Sometimes you get the correct people. Sometimes you don't. I'd give tech support a four out of 10.

Basically, we used the same company's storage. They kind of revamped the same model and gave it a different name. They rebranded it because they supposedly restructured the whole code, redesigned the code. But basically, it's the same model, but rebranded.

I think they advertise that configuring this model takes less than an hour. But we had an integration firm that came in to do the install. It took some four to five hours just to rack it and configure it. I wouldn't say it was too complicated, and I wouldn't say it was extremely quick compared to what they advertise, that, "You can get the box running within an hour."

I personally had other options that I would have liked to explore, but my boss chose this, so I had no choice.

It's basically the same unit as a VNX, as the predecessor, so it was not that much of a change besides a redesign in code. 

My advice would be do your due diligence in research. Ask a lot of questions. If you can go to the vendor - they have these offices where they have lab environments - go there. Check it out. Test it. Look at it. Do everything before you make the purchase, because once you buy it you're stuck with it. There's no money-back guarantee. Once you buy it, you're stuck with it for the next three to five years. You're spending a quarter million dollars all the way to maybe $5 -$6 million. It's not like you go into a retail store, "The shirt doesn't fit. Can I get my money back, or something else?" You can't do that.

They're slow to implement new innovation with their product. They look at other vendors, I'm guessing, use other vendors as a "guinea pig." If another vendor came out with something new and innovative in their product, they would probably sit there, wait three years to see how the market reacts to that special design, the functionality that they implemented. EMC doesn't really innovate. They just sit there and wait for other people to innovate, and then they just copy.

Their product is stable. That's why people just buy it. Their company is big, and that's why they buy it, because they know EMC has been around for ages. It's one of the very first SAN vendors, since the 1970s. It's that old. It's an ancient company, so people buy for stability.

• Fully automated storage tiering (FAST) cache capabilities. This allows some FLASH drives to be used to improve the overall performance and reduce the cost of the array versus an all flash or old style spinning disk array.
• Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE). This feature MUST be enabled after the purchase of the array. It has very little impact on performance and does not affect any of the functionality of the array. We advise always including D@RE on the arrays. You need to consider this upon ordering the array.

The lack of deduplication reduces some of the competitiveness compared to other products. The unity platform does not use data deduplication. This is a data-reduction technology to save space on the array.

I have used it for three months

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10, given recent issues that arose.

During the merger process with Dell, many of the cases were handled out of India with less expertise than in the past.

The initial setup is very straightforward. There is a wizard that guides you through the process.

Licensing would be easier if it would be more automated. The current process slows the installation as you have to go and get the license from EMC in the middle of the deployment.

Pricing seems very competitive. A majority of the required options come with the base licenses.

Dell EMC Unity XT is a storage solution. It is used to store data.

Dell EMC Unity XT should present a path or a roadmap on how they could put their products on the cloud. This would have some value for their current customers.

I have been using Dell EMC Unity XT for approximately eight years.

Dell EMC Unity XT is reliable.

The support for Dell EMC Unity XT is great.

We are happy with the way we have Dell EMC Unity XT configured.

The price of Dell EMC Unity XT is not reasonable. They should lower it because the trend is to move to the cloud. They have to protect their market by giving commercial or financial incentives.

My advice to others wanting to implement Dell EMC Unity XT is to start small because it's not commercially viable to maintain large data centers anymore. If you can downsize to the right size and try to offload the data. However, if you have critical applications, then it would require an on-premise solution. The best is still Dell EMC Unity XT.

I rate Dell EMC Unity XT a seven out of ten.

The most valuable feature that Unity had at that moment was the ability to communicate with the previous family, the Clariion. So, the migration and all the data transfer was really easy.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say the deduplication part, because for large deduplications, you need an extra appliance to do it in order to avoid having problems in performance. I think that could be improved, because everything should be included in the product, not with an appliance from the outside.

I have been dealing with Dell EMC Unity XT for something like 20 years.

The oldest implementation I have done for Unity was about six, seven years ago and it's been working pretty good. No problem so far.

I have had no problem at all. I think this is one of the most important things. It is very good. Maintaining it and deploying updates require very low maintenance. We haven't had problems. We had to replace a couple of disks in all these years, but it was pretty straightforward.

We switched to Unity because of the price, but that was for the migration from IBM to Dell Clariion. And when replacing the Clariion to the Unity, it was an easy migration of the data.

The initial setup was simple. The main problem is that you need an extra appliance outside of the disk - you need extra hardware.

My advice would be the same thing as the Data Domain - it is important that there is good sizing at the beginning. It makes a difference.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Dell EMC Unity XT a 10.

We use it for both file and block in a converged system, supporting a VMware environment and virtualization. VMware is the primary use case.

We have deployed it at remote locations; in a converged platform it really helps. We don't have to have two different storage system which helps to minimize the footprint.

It is a platform that we have standardized on for remote sites which enables us to have engineers and admins who are trained on and knowledgeable about the platform across the board. That enables them to support those sites, which is super-beneficial for us because we can do more with less.

The ability to mix and match SSDs with flash, and spinning disk in there as well, really allows us to meet our performance requirements.

Overall, the most valuable thing for our use case is the flexibility to have multiple-protocol support.

We'd like to see a cheaper version of an all-flash array in that footprint.

It's very stable. We haven't had any major issues with downtime.

It scales very well. It's built into the model line which allows you to scale as necessary. You can choose the model you need to scale with your needs.

Dell EMC's tech support is awesome. We've used both onsite help and remote phone support and I have nothing but great things to say about them.

The setup was really straightforward. We have a long history of using the Dell EMC product line so we are very familiar with the platforms and how they work. This was just the next evolution.

I give the solution an eight out of ten because it meets our use case very well. But it's an eight because nothing is perfect. There is always room for improvement, whether that be in the UI or something else.

Our primary use case is virtualization.

It's a great product if you want something that just works, and works fairly well. It's a product that's tested, tried, and true, where a multitude of customers have depended on the product for the overall requirements of their companies' data. Typically, a company's data is the lifeline of the company. So, if you want something that's tried, tested, and true, that is relatively feature-rich, and that just works, go for it, right. It's a fantastic product.

There are a lot of things that can be done with it. It's got Cloud IQ, but I think it's not as mature as it could be, they could make it more effective. They could make it more comparable to some of the other products out there that have cloud analytics. The amount of insight that the Unity product is able to give, at this point, is okay, but not class-leading. Some of the other data-reduction technologies, like deduplication, are not to the level of other competitors and what their products provide.

I'm nitpicking here and there. Overall, it's a solid product.

It's a stable product. You look at something like Unity, which is based on several generations of product, it's built on products such as the Clariions and the VNX, etc., so it's pretty stable. It's a tried and true product.

If you build it out correctly and it's intended for the workloads that you anticipate, then it's absolutely scalable. If you start to do more with it, and it wasn't built for that particular use case, then it's not as scalable. At the same, with Unity now, you've got the ability to do data-in-place upgrades. From that aspect, it can be relatively more scalable.

I have not used the technical support myself because I'm the architect building out the solution.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. Most arrays these days, they've made them pretty easy to set up. There's typically a management setup, and so on, that you have to follow through. But it's not overly difficult.

It's going to be hard for Dell EMC to really rebuild Unity because Unity, in my opinion, is still a more traditional array. Although they've improved the code, there's only so much they can do, because it's based on technology that's over ten years old. So, for them to make it more next-generation would be difficult. You're getting a tried and true product and you're slapping feature sets on top of it, which is good, but it's not going to be a true next-generation product. And that's okay, it's intended for a certain use case and it works well.

It's better than an average product but it's not a "godsend" product.