Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

All of the IT devices help production time. They make time "faster." But this device, in general, it is a money maker. It makes us a lot of money. That is what I like most about it. It is critical to the business.

The Snapshot feature.

Recently, they released products, sometimes without proper testing, it seems. I guess the way the market is going, the way technology is going, they are saying, "Hey, let's get it out there."

It was pretty buggy when we first got it, but they have improved it with some updates. They worked with us and addressed our concerns.

It will definitely meet our needs going forward. With all-flash it should be able to scale. You probably just need one 4U device and you have terabytes of space.

Technical support has dropped off over the years. It is what it is. It is probably a seven or eight out of 10. It is difficult to find the right person. 

It was straightforward. I cabled it up myself and racked it myself. Someone came out to help with the front-end side, the software side. That was it.

I rate it an eight out of 10, only because it started out buggy. Other than that, it has worked well for our company.

As a reseller, I cross many industries. I deal with a lot of state and local government, a lot of health care, and a lot of commercial and banking industries. This product fits that mold across all those spectrums, as do other EMC products, but Unity is primarily the one I go to market with.

Some of their recently added feature sets, like the dedupe and compression, they have been a pretty significant improvement. 

First, it's the "Unity," it's the name itself. It's unified, it does block and file, so that is pretty important to my customers who might have file servers around their environment. I can roll them all up into a single array, as well as provide block storage for them on one array. 

It's the simplicity part of it. It's the ease of management, it's the call home, the CloudIQ functionality. It's all built in. I think Dell EMC has put a lot of thought into it. That's what I push out to my customers, to bring that message to them.

They added the dynamic pools, that was the biggest improvement. They have incorporated replication, RecoverPoint for BCDR, they have a good disaster recovery, they have a good replication strategy. I think they've got their spots covered.

It is scalable, but you have to know your customer, and what the environment is. Perhaps you're going in there with a Unity 350 and then, at some point, do a data-in-place upgrade to a 450 or a 550. You have to get a good base understanding of what to initially go with for customers, so they're not coming back to you six months later saying "Hey, this thing is full."

This is an interesting question; how to gingerly talk about it? I think in the past, I've always been able to call - I have the phone number memorized, I've called it hundreds of times. I know there has been a lot of work on it. Dell EMC is starting to transition back and put more thought into their support.

I would give it an okay rating. I think there is headway that needs to be made as compared to competitors out there, to be honest with you.

It started down the Clariion route, and then we went to VNX obviously, when that transitioned over, and then we transitioned again to the Unity and we're on that side now.

As a service provider, on the VNX side, on the Clariion side before, we make our money in services. There could be a couple of days of services to install a VNX or Clariion, as we would go through all the processes to do so. On the Unity side, it is almost "next, next, next." If you can read a big Ikea instruction manual, you can install this Unity box. I give it to them, hands down, they have done a fantastic job with that.

From the services side, I'm a little hesitant about how easy it is, so I'm glad I have other things like RecoverPoint and the like, tertiary services I can continue to install.

Other competitors in the industry, they had a "me too" box, but I don't know if as much thought went into them as went into the VNX and the Unity.

I would give it a high nine out of 10. The only thing that makes me pull back is the continuing work on the support. To be a 10, that is asking a lot, in my opinion. But I think Unity is right up there. I think they're ahead of their game with any competitor out there. Compared to the top three or four that you could consider in this realm, I think Dell EMC has them beat, hands down.

We're actually in the first stages of getting it implemented. One of the ways it is really going to help in our organization is that we had to rely on VPLEX to do our replication for X-IO. We're going to be able to take several products out, which, I'm sure, Dell doesn't like too much. But being able to take some of those pieces out is just going to make it simpler for us to administer.

One of the things that I like the most about it is how they have changed the Unisphere GUI, and how it is now HTML5. It is so easy to use.

The array itself is so simple, easy to set up and easy to use, but it still has that great Dell EMC technology behind it.

I haven't found anything that has jumped out at me that they need to improve on. I have been very impressed with how it has gone out, because we use RecoverPoint in our environment and we're 99 percent VMware. Things just seem to show up, with very minimal setup on our side to get it to work.

I haven't run across any bugs in it yet, even from the implementation I did previously. We have had it in place in our environment for approximately three months now. I did an upgrade - the project manager wasn't happy that I did it - but the upgrade was very simple. It has performed like it is supposed to.

I think it will meet our needs going forward. I don't think we would ever max out the Unity that we bought, based on our business model.

I think the support from Dell EMC has improved greatly from what I received from EMC before they were purchased. They have been very responsive and very helpful.

I used to be on the VAR side, so I did an implementation in Texas, and then I went to Farm Bureau Health Plans. They were in the first stages of purchasing Unity to replace VNX, X-IO, and VPLEX.

It is very straightforward. It is like the old Geico commercial: "Even a caveman could do it."

I hardly ever rate anything perfect and best, so I would have to give this is a 9.9 out of 10. Nothing is absolutely perfect, but it's very high up there. I would recommend it to anyone.

Lately, the biggest use I've seen is around VDI and data migrations - migrating from the old VNX platform onto a new Unity.

So far so good. Everybody has been very happy with it. It has been a very seamless transition. The performance, from a VDI perspective, has been very good. They are very happy with it.

• Ease of use
• Ease of management
• Ease of deployment
• The GUI is very user-friendly.

I don't see a lot of room for improvement. Perhaps if they added more 10GB ports to the back of the system, so you have more IOPS out of the box itself to the network, that would help. But other than that it's a great platform.

The stability is awesome. It is very stable. No issues.

No issues with scalability. It is very good.

Our customers have only had to use technical support for replacing drives and things like that. When they do, they are able to get through to the right people and get the help they need.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Very easy.

Definitely do it.

The first time we got a Unity was last year. We started deploying some of our file system data into it. We have been seeing a significant improvement, not just the way that we take Snaps, but with the recoveries as well. We're also using it for block storage.

The way it takes the Snaps, that is one of the best features. Snapshot performance is what is key in the Unity, compared to a traditional VNX.

The reporting, I'm comparing the VNX with Unity. The VNX reporting is much more granular. The information that we need in terms of the IOPS, for example, and things like what my compression value is, that kind of information is pretty straightforward and you can just go to the dashboard and look for the information.

Unity is a pretty stable product.

I know there are new, scalable versions of Unity that are out there. We recently have been getting more because our data is increasing. Recently we got the latest Unity model, and we are planning to convert most of our VNX data over to the Unity at some point.

Technical support is five stars out of five. Every time it has dialed home for any of the issues that we have, so far we have seen very good support from EMC.

The new upgrades, the processors get changed, a new box comes in, there are new security vulnerabilities that the security team will ask us to analyze; those are the issues where we ask support for that information. We get a response pretty quickly.

The setup is straightforward.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We have been an EMC shop for a very long time and we will continue to use it.

We have certainly received a performance boost by moving to Unity.

We weren't looking at specific features. We needed to the additional storage and the performance.

No issues with stability so far, but it's early days. We have only been using it a few weeks.

It will certainly help us scale bigger. If I look at the footprint, the VNX's was multi-rack. Now, all of a sudden, we're only at a portion of a rack. And, obviously, if we can scale within the same rack - we can certainly see that by the number of hard drives we've had to put in - we can scale a lot more easily.

Support has always been good. Support, service, all of that, has been good. The guys have been knowledgeable, they know what they're doing. No issues.

We were on the VNX before and we needed to do storage upgrades, we ran out of storage. We decided it would be better to refresh the entire architecture. Went to Unity, which obviously gave us the flash storage as well. 

The transition was pretty seamless. There were no issues in the migration. It is early days. We have not yet gotten to the point of looking at advanced features.

When looking at selecting a vendor, it will be reputation, market share. It will be support, the pricing of the product; a roll-up of all of that is what counts at the end of the day.

I give it a 10 out of 10 for now, because we haven't had anything go wrong.

Most of the customers that I work with are using it for virtualization platforms. They are looking at it from a block data perspective. Most of them are leaning towards an Isilon platform for file-based data, so most of our traditional VNX customers have moved to the Unity platform, mostly for their structured block data.

Most customers are using it to gain some technical advantages through its simplicity and ease of use.

The benefits are the simplicity, flexibility and the ease of integration between the Unity platform and VMware, for example, and Microsoft platforms; the integration tools and the simplicity of management.

There have been big shifts, of course, in technology moving away from kind of the traditional three-tier architecture, so the Unity has gotten to the point where it's, once again, simple and optimized. Dell EMC has done a really good job of putting together a platform, one that is well supported.

There really aren't many weak spots, not many places to improve it.

The stability has been solid through dozens of implementations with our customers, from small to medium businesses running anywhere from 8TB to 10TB, up to some of our big enterprise customers using Unity for specialized systems running all-flash and half a petabyte type of scale. The performance and the stability of the platform have been stellar. No issues from customers.

Also, simple upgrades, stability right through the upgrade processes, they are very non-disruptive. It has been fantastic for all of our customers.

Moving away from the traditional EMC Clariion integration with the VNX, and some challenging upgrades through that process - specifically on the file side - the Unity, especially the all-block Unity platforms that we have been selling most of, are very simple, seamless, non-disruptive upgrades. Most customers are extremely happy with that. On the file side, the Unity is much easier to upgrade than it was traditionally with the VNX, so, once again, a big improvement over previous solutions.

The role I'm in, I'm not directly calling EMC for support. I did, for years, but I haven't with the Unity platform. I do get to handle a lot of our customers, any kind of challenging scenarios, making sure that my resources, my technical resources are responding, are as responsive as can be to our customers. 

I know from my group of technicians who support our customers, and from our customers, that the tech support has been very, very solid on the Unity platform. I won't say it's perfect across the board for all Dell EMC products, but primary storage, the traditional EMC - the VNX rolling into the Unity platforms - has been stellar.

I would put this solution at a solid nine out of 10. I don't think there is such thing as a perfect infrastructure. There is always room for improvement, even though I can't think of any. It is a strong platform.

In terms of advice, I think there are a couple of things. One of the reasons why I lean towards the Dell EMC solutions, as an EMC guy/reseller, is because of the completeness of vision. Across the data center with the disaster recovery, the integration with tools like RecoverPoint, with VMware, with some of the VMware tools, insight into the entire stack up and down. I would push most of my customers in that direction, versus a lot of the other players that are out there in the market today. We have seen some of them go by the wayside, we see a lot of new start-ups coming up. We see a lot of pressure from some of those start-ups that have an interesting gimmick.

Ultimately, when it comes right down to it, it's the supportability, it's the completeness of vision that Dell EMC has, and the integration. Typically, I will push most of my friends, colleagues, and customers, towards that platform.

The simplicity of the technology means it is easier for my team to do administration, to deliver.

The technology is simple and it is efficient.

The product is reliable.

It is scalable. For example, at this moment I have a large customer, a government ministry in Costa Rica. We have two Unity's with services for transactions on different scales. It has grown over the course of six months. 

From my experience, EMC provides good support, and Dell's service is very good. It is simple to call technical support and they immediately respond.

With EMC technology, you don't really need support. We have been dealing with EMC for 14 years. We were the first company in Costa Rica to use EMC. We have 14 or 15 devices and we no have problems with this technology.

My technical personnel have implemented different fixes or upgrades. I have good internal technical support in my company.