Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We have two all-flash Unity's and their primary use case is for VMware. We have two VMware's and the Unity's are the data storage back-end for them. We also have some 20 servers that boot from SAN, Fibre Channel. We also provide storage disks for the servers.

It helps because the all-flash feature is really boosting up the VMware. It is helping our virtual machines to perform better.

It's very simple to use. I really love the new Unisphere.

In a Fiber Channel world, things aren't really evolving, they're pretty stable. The VVols will be something that we'll look into later on. Now, we use very traditional LUNs that are attached to VMware as data storage, so we're not yet using VASA or VVol stuff. But maybe that will be something that, in the near future, when we update VMware to the next operating system version, we'll look into.

There is an ESRS problem that we're facing where, for some reason, the other Unity has not been able to register to EMC. The support information is not upgrading and nobody can tell me what is wrong with it. It's a minor issue, the ESRS is still working, but it is something that is very confusing and nobody seems to know what to do about it.

I think it is really stable. We have had one Unity for two years and the second one was bought this year. I have roughly two years' experience and we have had no problems at all. Then again, we are only using Fibre Channels, so I don't know if the file side or the iSCSI side has issues. But the FC side is working very, very well.

The scalability is really good now that they have the Dynamic Pools. We don't always have the money to buy complete write sets when we have to expand the storage, so now with the Dynamic Pools we can add disks on the go. It's an easier process to order them and to get more storage when we need.

We only used technical support during the installation. When we installed it, we had to fix some things with support. But after that, we have not needed to use it. DELL EMC support works really well with EMC storage systems.

Setup was very straightforward but, then again, I have a lot of experience with Fibre Channel. I've been working with two VNX machines, and with one Clariion before that. I've been doing this job for seven or eight years, so I knew exactly what I wanted. Our technical guy came and installed it and it was very, very simple.

When selecting a vendor, I really just want the product to work and the support to work. Every computer fails at some point. Every computer breaks down occasionally, and when that happens I need the support to act quickly and be as useful as possible.

I would give Unity a definite nine out of 10 at the moment. I really like the storage system. It's really good.

If you are using a fully virtual environment, I would suggest you check into an HC, a hyper-converged environment instead. But if you do need traditional storage and a SAN network, I would really recommend Unity as your back-end, if you're not too big to use Unity systems. They are mid-range storage. If you have a mid-range environment and you need to use Fibre Channel, I would really recommend a Unity All-Flash system.

Mostly, it is used for the storage of a fertilization environment. It performs fine.

All the features are okay, but not all of our customers are using all the features.

The features are nice, but you can't use every feature, because it costs in performance. Therefore, you have to choose which features to use to achieve a better environment. That is why customers do not use every feature in Unity.

It is very stable. While I have had downtime, it has mostly been due to a bug in the MCX version.

Scalability is good.

Since Dell took over EMC, the support has been very bad. Before, the support was fine. Now, the support is slow or they don't react.

As a partner company, if EMC does not react immediately, it is not good. Because if there are any issues with the customer, then we need assistance. However, it is getting better and could be better.

The VNX is also a good system, but Unity is a little better. I am not saying it is much better, but it is better than the VNX. 

Just use EMC.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. The product itself.
2. How the product is used.

It saves us time, it does not require a lot of admin from us. We are looking for things that we don't have to spend a lot of time managing. This solution falls into that category.

It is easy to use. Setting up replication is pretty simple. We just set it and forget it.

I'm not sure if it has a single pane of glass management console. That would be something we would like to see. Managing as many platforms as we do, as many physical devices as we have, anything that can provide a single pane of glass would be a huge benefit.

We're happy with the stability. We have not had any issues with it. We run all-flash on two of them and, so far, we have not had any complaints about performance issues.

Other than upgrades, I have not had to use tech support. When I have had to do upgrades, they have been responsive, and easy to get to.

We are replacing our VNXs with it. Performance-wise, it has been pretty stable. The code upgrades are fairly simple and straightforward. I can't say it has had any issues so far. 

When selecting a vendor, product stability is the big thing, but support is probably right up there with it.

I would use this solution over most VNX solutions. It is right up there. We have some Pure Storage, so it is somewhat in contention with that. We are mostly an EMC shop, so that's probably our biggest deciding factor. If you're an EMC shop, I would definitely go with Unity. If not, which you go for will probably be in the middle. Pure probably has the ease of use down a little bit better than Unity, but I would ding their support much more than anything I've done with EMC. 

Primary use case is block storage for healthcare IT. 

It has performed very well.

It has allowed us to be more scalable on the solution that we are buying, not having to overbuy a solution that we can't scale out.

The compression and deduplication which will be coming in version 4.3. With just those features, we will be reducing the amount of data and footprint on our hardware.

Among the biggest features that I wanted was deduplication, looking at the zeros coming in, in-line, and those will be available in version 4.3. There is nothing else I can think of at the moment.

Stability has been pretty rock solid for us. We actually did have one outage that was due to a bug in the code which caused the kernel to just run off on itself. It was a known bug. We probably should have been up on the newer code. We were a level behind. Although that bug was known, it caught us off guard.

Since then, we have had no issues with the stability. We have had 100 percent uptime.

Scalability is great, anywhere from upgrading the SPs to adding disks.

I would evaluate the technical support as doing pretty well. I have never really had an issue with Unity's support.

We were using a VNX solution, and the reinvestment was partially due to its age as well as support contract renewals.

When selecting a vendor, it often comes down to price, but we have been pretty much a Dell EMC customer for years. We look for their products, and it is traditionally pretty easy to move from product to product.

Very straightforward; simple. No Professional Services were needed on our install.

I give it a 10 out of 10. I like it for what our application does.

I would recommend it.

Storage for high I/O databases.

Most of our systems had their respective performance bound to how fast the DBs were responding. After migration to Unity 300F, we were able to put more DBs on flash, reducing latency. The results were visible in the front-end systems, and all users noticed the improvement. The change impacted not only end-user satisfaction but also productivity, as users were able to perform more in the same amount of time.

• Performance
• Low Latency
• Integration with VMware

These features are important for us for two reasons. The first two features - performance and low latency - are customer-facing and have direct impact on the user experience. This way, our work is more visible and we are able to improve not only user perception but business processes overall as well. VMware integration makes the life of our engineers easier, as we are almost 100% virtualized and this feature is used on a daily basis.

I have three suggestions: 

Improve the administrative user interface so it is easier to work with. Currently, a simple task, such as removing a host from 100 LUNS, takes a lot of time. If they could improve LUN to host model to be more like the EMC VPLEX, for example, it would be great.

Additionally we had one incident with a memory leak that led to controller reboot. Although it had no impact, when such things happens the storage should be more aware of it, send alerts, and propose corrective actions. 

Last (and I understand that it has a low chance of being implemented) the copy services currently are redirect on write. It would be great if the administrator could choose between redirect on write and copy on write, when configuring copy job.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Good.

We were using EMC VNX, and it was a natural upgrade from tiered to all-flash storage.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Migration was smooth and configuration of the storage was quick and simple. The time needed to put it into production was less than expected, and data migration itself went without a glitch.

We always do a business case, so I recommend that to others too. If the business case sums well, go forward.

We evaluated options from other vendors and, although there were some other very good propositions, we chose DELL/EMC as we have the knowledge and we trust the partner.

All-flash is a game changer. If you need performance, simple operations, and you plan to use it with VMware, it is a good choice.

• 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.

It takes a lot less time to manage. Setting up new storage for virtualization is really easy, so it saves a lot of time creating file shares. So, it does save us time, and cost when compared to any other storage solutions.

Ease of use is probably number one, compared to the previous storage that we've had. Easy scalability, easy set up. Compared to everything else, the Unity is, well, you could call it child's play. As long as you know what you're doing storage-wise, Unity is really easy to use.

Maybe deduplication would be something that would be better to have. Also, it's a fairly new management interface, so work is still being done on that. But compared to other vendors and previous EMC storage, the Unity is really good.

At the moment actually, it does everything it needs to do; I don't have any improvement requests.

No stability issues. Absolutely none.

For our needs, it's more than capable. We run about 100 virtual servers on it. We have about 100 users accessing the file shares from there, and I've seen no problem with that. We have about a 10GB backbone. Whatever we throw at it, it hasn't shown any sign of weakness or anything. It's been really good.

On a scale from one to 10, I'd probably give EMC customer support an 11. It's been really good. We do have premium support, which means if we have a problem, it gets solved really quickly. 

At one time, we had an issue with multi-protocol storage which was solved in about two days. It wasn't even that critical. It was something that was in testing, and for testing purposes I got it solved in two days. So, customer support has been just marvelous, splendid.

We used VNX previously. This was an upgrade from VNX. We've also used EqualLogic which, of course, is part of the same company today. But EqualLogic was just for simple file storage and more of a scratch storage because it was really cheap and we needed more storage quickly at one time. The EqualLogic was the easiest to get access to at that time.

Compared to VNX, the Unity is a lot easier to use. I could have kept on going with the VNX, but since the Unity was more or less the replacement for this size of storage, the Unity was the logical next step.

Dead simple. Comparing both EqualLogic and VNX, which basically are fairly simple themselves also, the Unity - as long as you know something about storage and what kind of storage or what kind of hardware you have below - it was just "Next, next, next," because it just uses the drives that you have. It sets them up automatically, creates everything more or less without almost knowing anything. It was very easy.

Perhaps I could have gotten some instruction online. The thing was that when I set it up, it had just entered the market. It was just about one week old when we got it. So, I don't think I would have found that much online, but then again, having worked with storage for the last 15 years, in essence I took a 15-year-long course before I got the Unity. But it was so simple, I didn't need any help setting it up.

More or less, I am the team. I do have three other guys, but yes, I was the one who decided to get this. The pricing was quite okay compared to others. We probably got it cheaper because we were the first ones out of the gate, but I would say that it's good value for the money.

I wouldn't say that I actually did look at anything else because I'm familiar with EMC and have been really satisfied with them.

It's really simple to use, set up, manage. Just be sure to know something about storage before you start, but that goes for any kind of storage solution that you use.

I actually want to give it a 10 out of 10 because it's been really easy to manage. It just does what it's supposed to do and it doesn't bother me. 

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.