Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

Our primary use case is for our product, Oracle Database, and it's performing very well.

The benefit of the solution is that it allows us to maintain an Oracle Database for our product, for our customers. Given the performance of the Unity array, we've been able to do more with less.

It's just a solid platform.

I would like to see better compression, better dedupe. It's not nearly as good as what is built into the XtremIO. I understand why that is the case, but if they can take some of that technology and leverage that a little bit better in the Unity array, that would be great. That would be the first improvement.

It's rock solid. All of the EMC arrays are rock solid. I wouldn't expect anything less.

Scalability is phenomenal.

Technical support is typically very good. The only issue is, where our products are located. it's hard to get technical support in there. Only certain individuals can go in there, so finding that right, cleared person is sometimes a challenge.

This is just the next generation. We started with the CX models, we went to the Celerra, and now we're only blocks. We've used the 5300, the 5400s. We've used them all for years and years.

When selecting a vendor what's important are 

• price
• the name
• the product itself 
• most importantly, stability. 

I need to know that I've got a device that's running and it's not going to go down; that has rock-solid stability. That's the issue.

The initial setup is different from the VNX arrays and the CX arrays, which we have played with and used for years. The interface is just different.

Previously, we manually did all of our RAID groups. We didn't use the pools in the VNX2, we just went down to RAID groups because that would give us the best performance. We could maintain that performance, we could control that. With Unity, that went away, so that was a little bit of a learning curve. We had to understand and learn to trust that it was going to do what it needed to do.

Compared to XtremeIO, the unity is a two out of 10. Compared to other products, like Compellent, which is a Dell product, I think it's better than the Compellent. I think it's better than the 3PAR, I think it's better than the Netapp. The whole VNX/Unity line has been the industry leader, as far as I'm concerned. if I were to rank the Unity against all of its equivalent competitors, I would say it's probably a nine out of 10.

I would give a colleague the advice that he needs to look at what his product does, or what the use case is for that device. The Unity array is, by design, block, with unified on top of it. NetApp is, by default, file, with a block added on, which is kind of a hybrid; it's not really block at all. It depends on what you're doing. If you're looking for a filer, NetApp is the way to go. But if you're looking for block storage, by far EMC Unity is the way to go. That is its design.

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.

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.

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.

• Enterprise production services
• Wide variety of applications
• Block only

It did not. Simpler interfaces mean less capabilities for managing. Inexplicable rules of configuration contribute to inefficient disk allocation. The Unity units are an okay upgrade from VNXe, but are a poor substitute for a VNX2 model. It limits the management, distribution, monitoring, and implementation of our storage LUNs.

None. Having used EMC products for more than 15 years, this is the first product in that time that I could find nothing to like.

• Improve the interface and provide more management capability.
• Remove the configuration limits.
• Start over.

Dell is far worse at support than EMC was. It headed downhill fast.

EMC for more than 15 years. Prior solutions were VNX and VNX2.

in-house.

Setup is simple, but at the expense of key management features.

Pricing is as high as it has ever been for EMC.

Compared IBM Storwize and some Dell storage options.

Software updates have to be downloaded to the root of the device. This pushes the available space to 95% utilization. Poor design.

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.

It’s helped with the overall stability of our VMware environment.

We use it to provide VMware VMFS to our VMware environment. Also, we use it for replication of data stores to another EMC Unity 300. This works fantastically.

• It’s easy to manage. 
• The interface is great. 
• Underlying functionality works well. 

The only improvement would be a lower cost per unit/disks, however on the whole we are very pleased with this product. 

None whatsoever. A big update was released in which Dell contacted us and did the upgrade.

None whatsoever. We expanded both our EMC Unity disks by 10TB without any disruption or issues. Simply added the disks, then created further data stores.

We moved away from NetApp FAS storage and really like EMC Unity.

Delivers High IOPS, but more important, low latency as this is the most important part for our usage.

• VMware integration, why is pretty self-explanatory, though Nimble offers better VMware integration then EMC does, which is odd given where EMC comes from.
• Veeam Backup integration: Veeam is the defacto standard for backing up of virtual environments.
• Fibre Channel support

I’d say better VMware integration. Currently, EMC relies on an additional VM (virtual machine) for integration with vCenter, whereas Nimble interfaces directly without the need of an additional virtual machine.

Both products are fully HTML5 compliant, which makes me very happy. We have been able to fully eliminate Adobe Flash thanks to this.

Firmware Upgrades in EMC Unity require you to manually download OS and Drive firmware, this should be integrated (Nimble does this). When you order an EMC Unity, you have to specify the block size. This is weird for me and even weirder that you cannot change this afterwards, you should be able to specify per LUN/datastore (Nimble does this as well).

No.

Not yet.