Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

• Use Replication function to build up cold or warm Disaster Recovery (DR) site.
• Use Auto-Tier and FAST VP to build up flexible space.

• Performance dashboard
• Because I always need to trouble shooting for IOPS & database (DB) performance issues. I can quickly focus on what is part of the issue. I can decrease downtime and can plan next year's extended capacity budget.
• Integration of the VPLEX function for Cross IDC structure.

For the integration of the VPLEX function for Cross IDC structure, they should integrate the function into the SP controller.

Yes, sometimes the DNS does not work out properly.

No, there have not been issues with the scalability.

Decreased administration efforts, improved manageability.

• User friendly interface
• Scalability
• It is shipped with all licensed, included for this product range, no need to buy additional licenses
• Flexible support plans 
• Prompt answers from EMC support

Thick provisioning of LUNs.

Firmware management form EMC. Strange way to populate firmware based on spread ratio among the customers of EMC Unity.

Yes, but did not affect systems which relay on it. Firmware patch was released by EMC.

Not for now.

We use it for virtualization. We have integrated it with Exchange and VMware vSphere.

This is actually part of a delivered solution. We have a VCV block, into which the Unity is embedded. The Unity is one of three components. We've got compute and networking in there. The overall product, with Unity being a component, is fine. And individual Vblocks are fine, but the stretched vCenter that we have was complex. Their product is called VPLEX and it was expensive.

It performs as expected.

• Stability
• Interoperability with the other components of the system

I would like to see better automation of upgrades, more seemless upgrades.

It's very stable.

It's fairly scalable. We went through a scale-up and it performed as expected.

The initial setup was moderately complex.

Hitachi.

If it's a value for your company then I'd recommend it. For us, it was expensive, but it was of value to us.

However, I wouldn't go through that again. We are targeting hyperconverged now, as opposed to converged. It was a bit overwhelming. From the VCE perspective, the individual Vblocks were very well executed, but they didn't seem to know the VPLEX product very well, and that was nail-biting.

This solution is our primary storage for all workloads.

It has good replication and integration with VMware.

This solution makes it easy to manage storage, provision new workloads, and scale-up.

The most valuable feature is the easy management with a great GUI. We can do a lot from there.

This solution would be improved with the addition of flexible raid volumes.

This is a very stable platform, so far zero issues.

Most of the systems are replacements for ancient VNXs. For most of the customers, we suggest they be replaced by Unity.

For our customers, the benefits are that it's not too expensive and it has almost all of the features from the beginning.

• Simplicity.
• Ease of management.
• It's still running on the ancient systems, so the customers know what they are getting.

I can't really think of any improvements for the next release.

The ease of installation, sometimes, for the customers, is not that positive because the customers think they can do it themselves. Sometimes that is a bit of an issue.

Very stable. Sometimes you can have issues, but they are usually solved with an upgrade of the system.

We have had two issues: replication between two Unity's, and when running several Snapshots on the Unity.

Scalability for us is not yet much of an issue because most of our customers are running on rather small systems.

Sometimes our customers use tech support but, generally, tech support is in order.

Setup is very straightforward. Compared to the VNXs, it's rather easy.

I would rate the Unity at eight out of 10, because of the ease of management compared to the ancient systems. For us, in Belgium, it is more small and medium businesses, so Unity is a good solution.

My advice is to choose the Unity.

For Unity, our use case is mostly test and dev.

Compared to older generations of arrays there is quite an improvement, compared to the older VNXs, for example. It depends on you use it, but for our purposes, we find Unity simple to use.

It's simple, easy to manage.

At the moment, we are pretty satisfied with it. Perhaps the user interface could be better.

It's more stable than the old generation of arrays. We had a lot of issues with the VNX, for example, but they got better over time. The VNX2 was better, and the Unity has been even more stable.

For our use cases, I believe it will meet our needs moving forward.

Tech support is very good. We haven't had many of serious issues, and the issues we have had have been dealt with very well.

The setup was straightforward. We set most of the configuration ourselves. If you have basic knowledge then it's pretty straightforward.

We did compare it to others at the time, but they have a wide selection of tools and products to meet our use cases. Good support as well.

It's flexible and we've been doing a decentralization exercise for the last number of years, so we've used the Unity 300 for our remote sites as a storage box.

The multiprotocol support. It's supporting NFS, fiber channel, CIFS, and these kinds of things. The multiprotocol is very attractive.

There is something that comes to mind. We've deployed these systems in a virtualized environment. We are running VMware, and with the VNXe it was possible to restore. We're using Veeam for VMware backups and with the predecessor, it was possible to mount a backup or restore a backup from a storage snapshot. With the Unity 300, this is not possible.

So far it's proven very reliable and very flexible.

So far we have no issues. But we are currently doing disaster recovery tests so we've deployed the Unity 300 with an expansion in our disaster recovery sites. Now we're going to do some serious tests, so we'll be able to tell you that in a few weeks, whether or not it holds its own.

I think I called once, when I deployed the first box myself, to validate whether the setup was correct.

And also with some call-back issues, the ESRS. We had some issues with that, the call-back support. Whenever a box encounters an issue, we automatically contact Dell EMC and log a call automatically. This function has proven somewhat problematic. But it doesn't affect any of the normal day to day operations of it.

As I said, we'd been using its predecessor, the VNXe. It's because the VNXe is being phased out that we switched to the successor, the Unity 300. But apart from that, we've been using EMC solutions for the last four years now. That's why we've stuck with EMC, ever since.

Some points are frustrating. There's no quick setup guides included with the box itself on paper, so you have to connect to EMC support for that. But apart from that, it's very straightforward, quite easy, intuitive. It's proven fairly easy.

As I mentioned before, we've used this product to deploy in remote sites, so as an alternative we were contemplating VMware vSAN. But in the end we didn't choose that option. We chose the shared storage option using the Unity 300.

My experiences are generally positive with this product. I would definitely recommend to others to go for it unless they choose an alternative.

The VNX5300 was a good all-around device, which we used for our VMware-based workloads along with CIFS-based file access. After our transition to HCI, we needed a dedicated, non-virtual machine-based CIFS solution that was easily scalable to fit our needs. The Unity 300 fit that and has not caused any issues since being in production.

We currently deploy the Unitys for CIFS-based file access to supplement our VxRail deployment, which was installed around the same time.

I would like the device to have the ability to pull down its own firmware. That would be a great thing.

We have had no stability issues with the product, including when adding replication on the fly, customer installed code updates, and customer installed DAEs.

We have had no issues of scalability with the product. The product has been upgraded with additional drives and enclosures multiple times without incident.