Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

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.

I use Unity XT to virtualize the customer's environment into scalable architecture. 

I like Unity XT's software-defined storage. It's a new feature that isn't widely used yet, but customers are impressed with it. 

Our customers are mostly happy with Unity except for the price. We primarily sell to enterprise companies because small companies cannot afford it. 

I have used Unity XT for three years. 

I rate Unity XT nine out of 10 for stability. Our customers are pleased with it. 

Dell Unity XT has a scalable architecture, but none of our customers scale it up significantly. Our client companies typically have 500 to 2,000 users. 

Dell's support is responsive. 

Setting up Unity XT is straightforward, and you need a week to get the solution up and running and migrate everything to the server. 

We typically sell Unity XT as a package solution containing four nodes. It costs about $150,000 for four nodes. 

We have explored solutions from HPE, but we felt Dell has a more comprehensive solution. Some people use VxRail for their VDI solution, but we have not seen anything like that yet.

I rate Dell Unity XT nine out of 10.

This solution is used for primary storage. We have a single installment with many units throughout our on-premises environment. We only have one XT unit and it is used for one of our core environments. It provides critical services such as DHCP and DNS.

This solution helped us reduce our physical footprint and power consumption. 

The inline deduplication and data reduction capabilities have been the most valuable.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

This is a stable solution.

Scalability of this solution could be improved. 

I would rate support for this solution a six out of ten. A few years ago, I would have rated it an eight or nine out of ten. The biggest challenge is responsiveness and getting to speak to someone who really understands our challenges. 

Neutral

We previously used VNX. We switched solutions to have an updated platform and integrated NAS services.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It is a plug-and-play deployment. It took half an hour to deploy and required two people. It requires routine updates for maintenance. 

We have experienced a return on investment using this solution. 

This solution offers great pricing. 

We evaluated NetApp before choosing Dell. We are more familiar with Dell's products which is why we decided to use this solution. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We are a hospital with many business applications running in-house, as well as File Server Business Apps, which is why we need a three-tier architecture for NAS and storage.

The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it's a single block, a complete block that includes both NAS and SAN. This was our ultimate requirement because we do a lot of file sharing.

When compared to other solutions, particularly HP, they lack the complete block.

The complete block and file sharing are the most usable features.

The features we need are already included.

They can certainly improve in terms of monitoring. The monitoring could be improved, and more features could be added.

We have 600 to 800 users.

This solution is extensively used; it's a hospital, and we use it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

I would rate technical support a four out of five. Technical support is good.

Positive

We have already found a solution. We have already purchased the solution from Dell EMC. Not the usual traditional HCI, we used the standard traditional one instead of HCI because our environment is more compatible with the previous set.

I've previously used the VNX, this one is superior to the VNX. And, in particular, the NAS file sharing feature. It's easier than before when compared to the other one.

The HP does not have the complete block. They have their own SAN, which is not in a single block. We cannot configure everything from a single, interface.

Multiple blocks are required in the HP one to control and monitor everything.

Because we previously used Dell EMC VNX 5600, the initial setup is very simple.

It is easier for us to move ahead with the same company.

I maintain this solution, it only requires one person.

The initial setup was handled by an integrator, and the rest of the migration was completed by myself.

It's extremely competitive. We checked both HP and Dell and we determined that Dell EMC was a better option.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis.

I don't recall the amount because that part, the financial part, is handled by the finance team. We are not aware of this, we are technical evaluators.

Definitely. This is something I would recommend to others who are interested in using this solution. Many people are unaware that HP does not have the entire block, despite the fact that HP's technical team claims to have it. Specifically, companies looking for NAS and SAN both together should consider Dell EMC over HP, because HP has a separate nest server as a separate server that they are providing you. However, they mention that the NAS is also available there, but it is on a separate server.

I would rate Dell EMC Unity XT an eight out of ten.

We are using Dell EMC Unity XT for our Oracle EBS on-premise ERP solution for storage. Primarily, for our database needs. We are quite happy with the performance of our SQL Server. 70% of OLTP and 30% reporting is the workload on that particular storage.

The solution overall has high performance.

Dell EMC Unity XT improvement point should be in the area of enhancements or innovation. It would be a benefit to have some kind of intelligence built into the solution with respect to the workload of their firmware. For example, if Dell EMC Unity XT is running an Oracle load or SQL application, we have to do other functions on it, find self remedies, or find self alerts to allow the administrator of the database to good insight into what exactly is happening in the storage layer. We are using different tools to retrieve partial information from the storage.

Having more artificial intelligence tools built into the solution would be a great benefit. This would allow us to see more about the workloads and higher visibility, such as performance degradation. 

I have been using Dell EMC Unity XT for approximately 20 years.

The Dell EMC Unity XT 450F is in production in our organization for the last three years, we have not faced any problems. The new version has been quite stable.

We are quite happy with the performance. The workload we are receiving on this storage solution is 70% for OLTP and 30% for reporting.

We have found the solution to be very scalable. We are in the process of receiving more enclosures that to increase the storage capacity.

We have approximately 1,500 users across the country that are using Dell EMC Unity XT and an additional 200 indirect users using it.

The technical support team from Dell EMC Unity XT has a proactive approach. We don't need to worry about what is going wrong we have them to support us. We have not to need to contact them frequently. They contact us in case of any alert that comes.

We have not used a solution previously.

The installation of Dell EMC Unity XT is not difficult. You only need to do the rack mounting and plug it into the environment. However, configuring it for the application is quite tedious because it doesn't have any built-in templates for different workloads. Installation is plain and the solution is not a challenge but configuring it for the workload is the challenge.

The time it took for the implementation to have the solution to a level we can use for production was approximately 48 hours.

We had support to do the implementation, we did not do it ourselves. We had a couple of engineers from Dell do the implementation and we managed the solution using our onsite team.

There is not a license required for the use of the solution. We purchased a maintenance contract.

We did a thorough evaluation of other solutions and it was clear after the performance evaluation, Dell EMC Unity XT was the best choice. We did a migration of Oracle Storage to different storage. There are other commercial advantages with Dell.

I would highly recommend Dell EMC Unity XT to others. I have experience with several sorts of workloads.

I rate Dell EMC Unity XT a nine out of ten.

We use it for block storage for our entire VMware environment, which runs Windows, Exchange, and SQL Server. The Unity also provides block storage for bare metal Windows Server that run our backup software. We also use file storage primarily to store images.

I use it with three projects that I directly work with. Each of those projects has 80 to 100 virtual servers. We have sysadmins who are dedicated to each project and do all the admin tasks, like checking VMs, servers, storage, etc. There is a larger team of five or six systems engineers who backstop all three of those projects. We focus on architecting and configuring any servers, storage, and networking. We may also be called in to resolve performance concerns.

Unity/Unity XT is significantly more user friendly than VNX.

We can do both block and file storage on one unit. For our projects, we use both of those functions. This is a key feature for us, along with very solid, predictable performance.

We use VMware in a number of projects but there isn't very good visualization of the storage from VMware or vice versa. I'm hopeful this improves in the follow on product, PowerStore.

I have been using this solution for the past seven years, previously at Dell and three years with my current company.

Stability has been very good, even the older models of Unity are quite good. The non-XTs and the XTs have been absolutely stable. We have had a couple of small hardware glitches, e.g., I have had to replace an LCC. That is literally it over the last three years.

This is a newer model for us. Out of the three projects that I have worked on, two of them are using the older model and the XT is primarily in another project. We have tons of scalability in it. We have a whole rack dedicated to Unity, and it is pretty much empty. We have probably close to a petabyte of storage in there, and it is still pretty much empty. Scalability looks really good.

Where we would run into a scalability problem, we are going to do a lot of image storage, and that doesn't compress well. So, flash drives wouldn't really help us. We need a big, scalable object storage system. That is where Isilon comes in. We have about three and a half petabytes of Isilon at each of that project's sites.

The technical support has been really great. I have never had a problem that they were not able to get to the bottom of pretty quickly.

Positive

We do have Dell EMC SC storage, which is very simple and straightforward, which is good for our small remote locations. However, it doesn't have the performance or features that the XT would. As far as block storage, Unity XT is probably the best bank for the buck for us because we can get block and file storage in one package. We don't have to buy a separate Isilon for object storage.

Including VNX, SC, and Unity/Unity XT, Dell EMC has provided all the storage solutions at the company for the last 20 years. 

The initial setup was super easy for the most part. 

I will note one issue. This might be on the sales team, but we had a need for encryption that I am sure we mentioned. However, the Unity that showed up at our data center did not have the licenses for encryption at rest. I would love to see Data At Rest Encryption (D@RE) be just the default since I can't imagine anyone wouldn't want it at this point. It would have made life easier for me. I definitely had to completely wipe out an array three days after we set it up, because it didn't have encryption, then redo it with a new license.

Vendor did initial install. I reinitialized it and did the final install.

There are cost savings from having a single solution that does both file and block storage.

Pricing could always be better. Dell likes to charge a premium price for these products.

I would say the major complaint with pricing is that Dell EMC comes to us and gives us a an initially high price. We usually need to go back and forth to negotiate the price to a more reasonable level. We are not going to just say, 'Yes,' because we are out of time." 

I don't know if the discounting structure needs to be better or more consistent. 

Having worked at Dell EMC previously, I know they have discount floors, etc. I just wish they would note, "This company gets a 55% discount." Just be consistent with it. Company-wide, we buy all our storage from them. They should be able to give us something a little more structured.

In one project, we needed more scalability that the Unity can provide so we are using Dell EMC Isilon for it. In that case, I needed multiple PB of object storage.

Otherwise, we have not looked at much else. In the future, however, we will probably transition to Dell PowerStore.

I would rate it as nine out of 10. It is definitely one of the most robust, solid, well-performing products that I have dealt with. It is set it and forget it, which is wonderful for my piece of mind.

We currently have three Dell EMC Unity XT units, all used for different applications.

The primary use case is general, all-around storage. We use it for both unstructured file and unstructured block storage and a lot of it is attached through a few systems to VMware.

The applications are databases and other similar products.

One of the units is used for diagnostic imaging, and another is used for file services such as the Hospital Management System (HMS).

I don't have metrics but this product benefits us because of its reliability. It's like a black box that sits in the background and just runs. It works great and does everything that's asked of it.

The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs.

This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.

It could be a little easier to attach it to a network file system.

I have been working with Dell EMC Unity XT for approximately four years. It has been at the company for five years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We haven't really had to scale it too much. Whatever we've had to do, it's been able to accommodate what we need. We know that it can grow more but we just don't need it to. Also, we're shifting away from it because it's being replaced.

Dell's technical support is great for 99% of things.

There have been a few problems but I understand because the product was not mainstream. The unit was an FS8600 and there were only about 12 people in all of North America who knew it well. That's why we got rid of it.

Overall, I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten. I don't give anybody a ten because there is always room for improvement.

The organization did not have a previous solution. The original two devices were brought in specifically for the tasks that they perform. The third one is dedicated to the new HSM software.

We have other storage, on-premises. We have different storage for different things. For example, we have two Dell Compellent units, as well as Isilon. We run the gamut of everything.

We are retiring two of our Unity XT units because we bought a Dell EMC PowerStore. We're updating everything as part of our refresh cycle. We will be keeping the last Unity XT for at least two more years because it's a fairly new system. It will probably be replaced by a PowerStore as well.

I was not with the company when it was initially set up but I have set up other ones. This product is straightforward and easy to set up. It is almost set-and-forget, where you get it on the floor and away you go.

It took me less than a day to deploy, from unboxing to putting it on the raised floor to powering it on and having my first system attached to it.

I deployed it myself. I have been working with storage products for more than 20 years.

It is myself and two others that are responsible for the maintenance. All of us are backup and storage engineers. I am the primary and the other two are my backups. We all take different approaches and handle different things.

For purchases, we have always dealt with Dell through a third party because until recently, Dell did not do direct sales. The company we used was Techni-Core and they're okay. We've had some issues with them including some improperly configured Isilons and other systems that were not done correctly. Back when I first joined, I had to go in and spend four months debugging a system that was set up wrong.

I think that they had a couple of people that were poor at doing installs but I'm pretty sure they are now gone because I don't see their names anywhere.

We see a return on investment because this product just runs. We don't have to spend hours maintaining it. It needs less intervention from us which means that we can spend time on other things.

This solution is a good price for what you get.

We are a Dell customer so we did not evaluate options from other vendors.

Everything that we have is Dell unless it is something that is vendor-issued or vendor-specific.

We only touch the edge of what this product can do. It can do more than we use it for, such as file replication between two units.

There is not much needed in terms of improvement. It is a rock-solid product.

My advice for anybody who is considering the Dell Unity XT is to just enjoy it. It's a great system that is easy to maintain. Right out of the box, it's a good system. It's not the best that I've ever used but it's pretty close.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use Unity solutions for our data center operations as a primary storage environment.

We were able to retire all our VNX systems and reduce the footprint in the data center. The Unity systems can scale up quickly, so we use less space in the data center if we employ more Unity systems than the old VNX systems.

Unity is scalable and you can configure it quickly. 

One area of improvement is replication. We are also using Oracle virtual machines, and when you are using systems from other vendors, the process of replicating from Unity through OLVM is more laborious than when we were using VPLEX. It takes a little more work when we are incorporating a third-party environment. 

I've been at my current job for almost five years, and we have been using Unity that whole time.

I believe Unity is stable. However, we haven't used it for long, so I can't really know how stable it is until we have enough time to work with it.

Scalability is one of Unity's biggest advantages. It looks like we're going to need to do a lot of expansion because any capacity we purchase gets consumed pretty fast. We'll have to increase our footprint on Unity.

I rate Dell EMC support 10 out of 10. They respond rapidly and do a good job. When I have an issue and need technical support, I reach out to them either through chat or by submitting a service request, and the response is good.

Positive

My company was using EMC Symmetrix. They moved from Symmetrix to Dell EMC VNX and then Unity. They have not done any other evaluations of other vendors aside from EMC.

Implementing Unity was straightforward. We were able to move through the process of setting up the systems based on the procedure the vendor provided without any problems. Once we got started, I think it was just a couple of days. 

The company purchased a support contract, so we worked with Dell EMC to deploy the system.

We just deployed these new Unity systems a couple of months ago, so we haven't had an opportunity to assess the cost savings yet. As we continue moving ahead, we'll be able to do that. The company is scaling up Unity, so if they are willing to scale up quickly, they like the product, and there is something advantageous to the systems. Whether in terms of money or performance, they seem to be getting some value from the systems.

I'll rate Dell EMC Unity nine out of 10. It's a great, scalable product that performs well. Out of many options, it would be my first choice.