Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We've used both Unity 380 and Unity 480. My experience is very good, and I never had a problem so far.

It is running on one of the biggest hospitals in the Asia Pacific where the OPD is 9,800 OPDs a day and 3,500 priority patients, handling about 30,000 core records, - both images as well as data. 

Unity XT 380 is for the entire production of data from one hospital. It includes the patients, geographical information, payment information, and everything. On XT 480 we have all the information relating to CTs and MRIs of all the patients - basically all the images. We have about 256TBs of data there. 

The data compression technology is very good. It's very good at fetching data as well.

It's very good if there are ever any failures. We've never had an issue with storage. 

There's deduplication available. 

It's easy to set up.

We haven't faced any issues so far.

The pricing is a bit high. We'd like it to come down.

I've been dealing with EMC from 1996 and the Unity XT hybrid, both flash drives, as well as the regular XT 480, which is used for fax machines. I've been using them from 2014 onwards - since the day it launched.

The solution is 100% stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We normally forecast for seven years. Based on that, we select a model, and then we will upgrade one by one onto that if necessary. On a 380F, we used to add only the drives for the additional volume, and if it is in a server for the regular task for the images, we used to add an external additional drive of 140 TB.

I have not tried any other brands.

All my customers request it and it has to be supported by us. We never had any failures. Therefore, they stick to this product.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Even upgrading the firmware is very nice. You don't need to shut down. Previously, we used to have a shutdown, and now we hand over to one more processor, upgrade the one processor, and then switch back to this process, and then we'll do the upgrade for the process so there is no downtime.

I'd rate the ease of implementation nine out of ten.

Since we are holding almost all the data, which are all critical and confidential, the deployment is always on-prem only. It takes a maximum of two to three hours.

The solution is almost finalized before ordering. We plan what has to be done, and how many services have to be connected through the HBA. Based on that, the number of fiber ports should have been ordered along with the system. Normally, it comes with two fiber-channel HBA adapters. We used to order with four channels instead of going for a sand switch. We connect three servers directly into process A and process B. Before getting into the server, all the servers should be up and running with the HBA connector with the fiber cable ready. Once we install the server, we will see if the firmware is up-to-date or if it is one month old since the shipment takes at least one or two months before it reaches our hands. 

If there is any new update, we will check with them to see whether the new firmware is good or if there are any bugs in it.

If the support team says there is no bug, it means we will update the firmware and create a pool. If it is a hybrid pool, we'll do a mix and combinations of flash as well as the NSS for the images. For the data, we have only the flash itself, and we use a rate six for the data. Previously, with the regular SaaS drives, we used to have a rate ten; however, with the flash drives, we used to have rate five or rate six only. 

Normally, in-house inside the rack, we need two people. Otherwise, one engineer itself will do.

If it is a flash drive, only one person itself will be enough. If it is three bay drives with 144 TB or 288 TB, then we'll go for one more person to fix inside the rack. Once it is fixed, the installation will be done only by one person.

For maintenance, normally, we check the firmware updates within a month, or we check every 30 to 45 days to seek out firmware updates. We provide maintenance to our customers. For other issues, we might call technical support. Most things we can manage. 

Installations will be done by our team.

Customers have witnessed an ROI while using this solution. 

While the cost is a little high, it provides great peace of mind. 

I'd rate the solution five or six out of ten in terms of affordable pricing. 

I'm a system integrator.

The latest version I bought about three months back. I bought one 6380F.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

My clients use it from a virtual environment. So, there is a NAS application as well.

It is an on-prem virtualization solution.

In my experience, the application configuration is a standout feature. It allows users and even admin nodes to be configured more smoothly. The process, especially after zoning, has become more streamlined with enhancements in bin management, cleaning, and initiatives.

The ability to have flash to adapt to your environment. It's one of the best solutions you can actually use for the database.

Dell Unity XT's integration capabilities are good, like VMware features and other features that are already added. It's quite good.

It is easy to use. The interface is quite user-friendly, and the integration is not too difficult.

The only challenge I've ever had was with a Drive firmware upgrade.

However, when I did an on-prem performance [assessment], it didn't pose much of a problem.

I have been using it for six years.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

I've done upgrades a couple of times. It wasn't too hard to upgrade. A few times, it involved adding capacity depending on how the size of the collections began. And boom, we're good to go.

Within the last three months, I did an upgrade on Unity. It was quite simple. We downloaded the firmware, and then there was a bit of setup. And just a few steps, and we were ready to go.

Our clients are usually enterprise businesses. 

The only time I've ever had a challenge was when the problem had gone beyond the initial support. And when we moved on to the next person who took over, it was really about them fully understanding what we had been troubleshooting.  

Positive

The initial setup is very easy. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy.

It's quite easy. Once you have the application that needs to set up the connection in utility, we are good to go.

I have not had any cloud training in Unity. But the first time I had to deploy one by myself,  it was one of the easiest things I could ever do.

The deployment takes a few minutes. Because if you have your IPs prepared and your router is done, the deployment usually just takes a few minutes.  

I would definitely recommend using it because of its integration part and scalability. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a unified storage, and it is useful for mid-range storage. All the SME clients of our company that we have here trying to implement SAP want to use the three-tier architecture for server storage, and they all find that Dell Unity XT is one of the leading products, and our company sells a lot of boxes because of the aforementioned reason.

I don't see any weaknesses in the product, nor did any of our company's clients report any issues. The only issue is with the product's scalability because it's not as scalable as the other polished tools in the market.

It would be good if Dell could work a little bit on the scalability front and make sure that they increase the bandwidth at the back end as well as make the product a more capacity-oriented one, and provide one petabyte to make the solution easier to use.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for six to seven years. I am a system integrator. My company has a partnership with Dell. I am also a reseller of the solution.

It is a stable solution that sells a lot. Though we have sold Dell Unity XT to bigger companies, it is Dell PowerStore that we have sold the most to bigger companies that have around 1,000 to 5,000 users.

The product's scalability has some issues.

The solution's technical support is very good. We haven't faced any issues with the support team. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Before Dell Unity XT, we were familiar with IBM and had sold a lot of IBM Storwize V3700 storage boxes.

The storage boxes by IBM are not number one in the market since they were not unified storage but SAN storage. Though IBM launched unified storage, our company does not sell much of IBM. After IBM launched unified storage, they allowed Lenovo to sell off their storage, and our company stopped selling IBM products.

The deployment phase of the product was very easy.

The solution can be deployed in four to five hours.

I need two certified personnel in NetApp and Dell to carry out the deployment process.

Dell Unity XT's prices are very competitive compared to HP MSA2000, an entry-level product and another higher-level storage box. Compared to the prices of the storage boxes offered by HP, Dell's prices are competitive.

All the licenses are included from day one of your purchase of the product, so you don't have to buy licenses separately. There are no additional costs to be paid for the maintenance of the solution.

I suggest to those planning to buy the solution to buy it with a five-year warranty rather than the standard three-year warranty provided by Dell since it will be, price-wise, cheap for them. It is better to negotiate during the current because later on, the prices for the warranty will increase from ten percent to twenty percent, and you will stand to lose if you don't sign up for a five-year warranty offered by Dell.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

We are running 3,000 VMs spread out over five such units.

The initial Unity x50 series, even all-flash, were quickly driving the CPU to near 100% on as little as 180TB, having data reduction on all volumes in place.

XT came in to support and sizes better on our infra, due to more CPU power. The system doesn't seem to have a module to offload data reduction, but in the end, does a great job of getting the data reduction to come around at higher capacity without oversubscribing the CPU (%). In the end, the SDD media cost more than the array/storage processors. So basically you want to reduce data as much as the system can take.

Good in-built monitoring tools from the System|Performance Section Tab is valuable. From CloudIQ you can reach out to vCenter as well. ESRS (Call Home) on the service delivery part is valuable.

Remote Code update support (interactive or not) is free of charge, as you wish, nonetheless you are free to do it yourself as updates are cumulative and retained on each new code level.

The uemcli is not an object-oriented CLI and the more object-rich PowerCLI has been discontinued. Only people with bash experience possibly can operate it. Still, nowadays, feeding object from one command into another is still a burden with such CLI. When adding a few disks to a cluster, the CLI is actually standing in the queue for one disk to be added to all, requiring multiple scans on each member host, before proceeding with the second and scanning all hosts once again. One could add all disks at once and stand in the queue once for a rescan all.

There isn't a means to add volume groups or host groups. A feature that any solution I worked with so far has. It's a burden to assure each host has the same LUN ID on each host in this manner. As of the June 2021 release, code OE 5.1, seems to offer the option to have host groups in the end!

===> Review 01/2023: Unity OE 5.1 came out with the notion of a host group

The integration with vCenter comes with a side effect, in that it will take control of the vSphere scan process, moreover, every esx host is scanned multiple times. It takes easily a few hours to add a few LUNS to a few hosts. This is rather painful. Even when adding LUNs using the Unisphere GUI, you can keep up with the pace of your script.

Support Responsiveness and time to fix bugs should be improved. Over the past 1.5 years, we had occasional controller reboots and we went all the way from OE 4.5 over 5.02 to 5.03, 5.1, and 5.2.1, and eliminated the most common causes. We still face a stress-triggered cache merge issue and though we provided the dumps and engineering acknowledged the bug, it has been told that addressing the bug requires substantial code rewriting and the problem will be fixed in the next major code release (OE 6.x). We are now two years later, still no fix, but fortunately, face the condition occasionally, and among even other bug checks.

===> Review update 01/2023

There was also a problem of a  Storage Processor Panic condition that could unveil after uptime in days had been reached. We had two such crashes and the uptime of our five units (ten controllers) showed they all bypassed the uptime, which had the potential to even crash the remaining eight controllers. Without much explanation on the cause (Typical at Dell EMC), it seems like a memory leak issue to me. We decided to reboot them all as a quick reply and later on to patch them on a more convenient maintenance window.

It was only until this summer that the issue is known and formalized to the public and listed as DTA 205836: Dell Unity: Storage Processors Running 5.1.X Code May Panic After 275-300 Days of Runtime (User Correctable)

All Unity systems running Unity Operating Environment (OE) version 5.1.X, but primarily Unity XT systems (480, 680, or 880, including F models), may experience SP panics after 275-300 days of runtime.

==> Review 29.01.25 codes 5.3 & 5.4 evaluation

We had no controller reboots anymore, not on the 650f nor on the 880f arrays. We use the solution soley for block/FC. It has been all around a very viable solution for our (exclusively) block workloads for 5 years. We are about to decide to refresh our 5 arrays towards the newer Powerstore. We can only hope for what Dell EMC delivered with this "Unity". Not ever had we had a complete downtime (only single node panics) for 5 such arrays , the oldest went into its 6th year recently. 

I discovered that the RESTAPI has lots to offer and there are more metrics then in Unisphere & Apex Observabiity (ex CloudIQ or your on remote infra presented Perf collections and Alerts). 

I have been using Unity (XT) for 15 months.

OE 5.03 was a rather mature and stable code, without to say that it will address all. Some bugs are stress/load triggered and rather exceptional but might be easily recurring if the same conditions are met again. 

===> Review 01/2023

Code 5.1 has no improvement, quite on the contrary, there was initially also an issue with Veeam in the sense that DELL EMC unilaterally deprecated some commands, which caused Veeam to no longer be able to interface with it for storage-based snapshots of ESXi VMs. There came a code/OE specifically to address this, but it took a while, likewise, the solution from Veeam to replace their integrated and deprecated UEM CLI interface took even longer to accommodate DELL Unity product engineering changes.

Code 5.1 flaw-

All Unity systems running Unity Operating Environment (OE) version 5.1.X, but primarily Unity XT systems (480, 680, or 880, including F models), may experience SP panics after 275-300 days of runtime.

The XT scales better than its predecessor. 

===> Review 01/2023

The Unity product will not survive as its own brother in the same low-end midrange, being PowerStore, is in all aspects a better product (latency and scalability-wise).

It is not the most responsive support, we have a Service Account Manager and reporting in place now and keep the pressure to get answers. They have very bad post-bug/incident follow-up. You only get a record that the problem is either known or recorded by engineering, but not when it got corrected retroactively, nor any prospected date when it will be corrected.

Also some fixes require substantial rewriting , others are fairly simple but again, once the bug is recorded, you are not retroactively informed and need to read the release notes ffor fixes and hope for your issue to be listed.

Despite this, bugs are luckily rare if one considers these units operate 24/24 hrs  365/365d, so some arrays get clean sheet but not each year , another one faces a reboot once or twice a year. All considered, its like DELL states, its a surely a rare bug and you have 2 nodes instead of 1 for such issues.

Neutral

The system is easy to install and you might be able to do it on your own on the 2nd attempt.

The first three systems were set up by a reseller, the Unity XT by myself. It's rather straightforward if you have FC/Block or Eth/NFS Storage array experience.

Ease of use, Ease of setup , Price Quality, vSphere Integration, Remote CloudIQ data (Performance data & Alerts), and ESRS/SCG  (Call Home integration). 

The setup is rather straightforward.

I have compared Unity x00/x50f versus Unity XT x80f. 

Midrange solution for SMBs up to large enterprises too, if you spread the load on many units.

We use the solution for site recovery manager, DR, and endpoint penetration. Dell Unity XT is integrated with vCenter. It has automation and is configured automatically in Vcenter.

It would be great if the solution could integrate an NVMe disk.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for two years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.

The solution's technical support was fast.

Positive

It is very easy to set up and configure the solution.

It is not hard to manage Dell Unity XT. Dell Unity XT works fine and has never failed since its implementation in our infrastructure.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We currently provide data solutions to both HP and a banking client. The banking client utilizes our DNS solution. I have introduced our kit for selling the smart technology integrated into our offerings.

Scheduled components are sourced from Korea based on their quality selection, with the actual purchase taking place in Vietnam.  

The storage dynamics are managed uniformly on a global scale, whether it is a simple or wide-ranging configuration.

They place a strong emphasis on service, occasionally requiring approvals. However, with full installations, they have achieved almost uniformity. Their storage approach differs from a consolidated business-based model; instead, it is application-centric. Their investment in solutions is geared towards specific needs, such as the banking or information system, acquiring smaller storage units individually.

I have been using this solution for 15 years. 

The discussion revolves around the Ports program, which has been implemented and operates as a single system based on my direction. Additionally, adherence to government requirements is necessary.

The preference for Unity arises from its investor-driven segmentation, specifically tailored for application data systems, eschewing any consolidation. Despite possessing numerous units, there is doubt whether it is feasible to invest exclusive authority for each application separately, eliminating the need for consolidation.

The consideration of scalability introduces the ability to simply add on hardware, particularly with SaaS and HTTP. However, certain aspects, such as metadata or previous HTTP pages, present challenges that necessitate careful attention.

The initial support for the second job from PA in Vietnam is highly commendable and competes well. Moreover, my NDA has proven to be exceptionally effective.

Positive

We are currently undergoing a conversion involving the installation of hardware and configuration. Initially, the focus was on infrastructure areas, specifically addressing endpoint agents. Subsequently, the emphasis shifted towards application-centric operations. I oversee the configuration and setup, encompassing both hardware and software aspects. 

The hardware setup is primarily based on production, involving tasks such as TCDR for the production environment. They initially acquired storage from Zero Ten, utilizing EMC. Over time, they transitioned to HTTP storage, and presently, they are considering a comprehensive replacement of their storage solution. The ongoing shift is towards a more advanced data system, albeit not classified as high-end.

It is an average priced solution.

I would rate it 8 out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for storage. 

The interface is very good. It's user-friendly and easy to navigate.

It is easy to set up the product initially.

The product has helpful local technical support.

It is very scalable.

It is stable and reliable. 

Its replication technology could be better. There is no option to postpone the replication after a failure. 

I've been using the solution for about three years. 

It is a stable product, and it is quite reliable. I haven't come across any bugs or glitches. It does not crash or freeze. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. The downtime is literally zero.

We have found the solution to be scalable. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten in terms of the ability to extend. 

We have about four people directly working with the solution. They are system administrators. 

I've dealt with technical support in the past. They are helpful. We've worked with a local engineer, and he has been helpful and responsive. 

The initial setup only took one day. The initial setup itself was straightforward. 

We handled the deployment ourselves with the help of Dell. We did a standard deployment. 

I'm not sure of the exact cost of the solution. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. I would rate the solution nine out of ten. We've had a good experience with eh solution. The only issue for us has been the replication technology.

We are resellers and deploy the solution for our clients as a guard for storage on virtual machines, databases, and their VDI. 

The solution allows for easy, useful replication with good features for VPLEX and VIVO. 

The solution should include a free process in the HPE portal that uses serial numbers to verify that hardware is genuine. We find Chinese hardware easily but it is difficult to determine if it is genuine which causes problems. 

The solution should allow for connection and replication with other storage models such as HPE, IBM, and Hitachi.

I have been using the solution for two years. 

The solution is very stable and I rate it a ten out of ten. 

The solution is scalable within the storage limitations for each model.

For example, category 380 allows for one device. To scale up, you need to add additional software or hardware like VPLEX.

I rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

Our company handles software issues but uses technical support for hardware replacements. 

Due to sanctions in Iran, I am not permitted to contact technical support directly but must submit issue tickets through authorized agents. I am unable to rate technical support because I do not have direct access to them. 

The initial setup is very easy. 

Depending on the size of the project, we assign two to ten engineers for setup and deployment which can take a total of one to three hours. 

We also provide six hours administrative training to our customers via small, on-the-job courses we have created. 

Most licenses for the solution are free but upgrades are available when adding additional software or storage. 

The solution little or no cost so I rate it a ten out of ten. 

Supply of genuine hardware is challenging and there should be more availability in the market. I rate the solution a seven out of ten.