Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

I work as an integrator and this is one of the products that I have implemented in different locations. Most customers choose this product because they want to have faster storage. The XT series is all-flash, so it's fast.

I recommend it for ERP systems and for people running Oracle Database. I have implemented both of these. Most applications these days are implemented in a VM environment with a Hypervisor, and this product is well suited for virtualization.

The setup and installation procedures are easy.

The management is done using a single console, which is good. You don't have to use a separate VM to manage the storage.

The most valuable feature of Dell storage systems is the tiering. However, with an all-flash system, there is no tiering.

The monitoring capabilities should be improved.

The reporting should be better. In other systems, you can create many different kinds of reports but this is not the case with Dell.

Dell Unity is going out of support soon, which is bad. They should continue to support it, rather than have it end after five years.

I have been working with the Dell EMC Unity XT series for three years.

Unity had a lot of trouble with stability in the beginning, but it is stable now.

This is a scalable product. I have set up the device in a lot of different locations.

The Unity technical support is very good.

I have also implemented Dell EMC PowerStore and Unity is better. The PowerStore had a lot of issues when I deployed it.

I also work with HPE 3PAR and I find that it has better monitoring capabilities, a better GUI, and better reporting. Reports with different views can be exported. In Dell products, the reporting is not as good

With 3PAR, there is another appliance required to operate the storage but with Dell, it's good because you can manage it from the same console. You don't need another VM to manage the storage.

The initial setup is very easy to do and there are no prerequisites.

Installing the license is easy. You just have to download it from the portal.

Upgrading the product is also easy to do.

This is a great storage solution and a product that I recommend. That said, it's not perfect. More can be done from Dell to improve the Unity series.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for user shares and VMs.

We have 200 people using it in our organization.

The snapshotting is slick.

I like how it separates the iSCSI drives from the standard shares. It has two different routes to it. I know most of the other solutions do this, but I just like the way that Dell EMC does it.

I like the dashboard, which gives me a quick reference on my monitor as to what is using what bandwidth.

It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there.

Our solution is four- to five-years-old. We use it every day.

I have never had any stability issues. It has been solid and stable. The dual platform, i.e., how it sits one head on top of the other, has been rock-solid. I have never had an issue with it.

I have noticed there is another version that has come out.

I haven't scaled it yet. The way that I set it up was half the drive bays are being used. When I do need to scale up, I am just going to duplicate the other half of the drives, stick them in there, and then spin them up.

The technical support is good and quick.

I would like a little faster response, but I don't think that their response is really that slow. They respond fairly quickly, at least fast enough for most issues. If it was an emergency issue, it might be different, as they probably would move it up the ladder anyway.

It is a little bit of a pain at first to set up the snapshotting. However, once it is set up, and you figure it out, it is not that bad.

I needed one of the specialists to set it up initially, which is not surprising because the solutions are a pain in that way. Some of the menus, and how it is at first, are a little awkward. It takes a little while to get used to, then it all starts to make sense.

I liked the price point when we purchased it.

I don't know what other units have that Unity doesn't have. Though I would say to them, "Keep up with your competition."

Look at it online. If you can get a demo version in-house, give it a shot.

If you need to keep data safe and make sure it doesn't go anywhere, Dell EMC Unity is a good way to go.

I would rate them as nine out of 10.

We use it as block storage for a couple sites. 

The performance is fine for what it does. It is flash and spinning media.

For sites that we use it on, it gives us more flexibility and high availability solutions. It is easier to expand the site, if needed.

It is simple to use and easy to manage. We don't touch it after we set it up. It is not something you constantly have to go in everyday and tweak, which makes it beneficial.

• Ease of use: The GUI management is very easy to use.
• The management is easy for us. We rarely touch it now. It just runs.

I would like the UI to look better.

Stability is very good. It has been running for over a year now without problems. We haven't had any dropped layers.

The growth is difficult to forecast, but it's easy for the unit to grow when needed. It is very scalable.

The technical support does alright.

We didn't have a solution in place for the size that we needed to have a high availability solution. Dell EMC is our preferred storage provider, so we went out and worked with them to get a solution where we have a cluster environment to VMware and a failover with the other node along with shared storage.

The initial setup was very straightforward. This was not our first SAN array, so I just racked and stacked it, and they gave us the IPs and turned it over to us. 

The purchasing has been simple. When you do need storage, you spec it out. Then, you receive a quote back and make a decision from there. 

The last purchase was in China, so I was more on the config, less on the purchase side.

The solution should be cheaper.

We evaluated NetApp. We decided on Dell EMC because we are more familiar with them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Price.

• Fiber channel connectivity
• Fast cache features
• Support of VVOLS
• 10GB NICs
• Support of high performance and rapid provisioning/expansion options
• Deployment time is quick from unboxing to setup
• Scalable
• Supports both small environments and larger deployments
• Supports hosts connected via fiber channel directly to the unit without the need for fabric switches

Unity 300 is now the go-to storage device we use as we virtualize our infrastructure.

The SAN currently exceeds our requirements in terms of performance. We have estimated for 30% growth per year for three years. The configuration purchased had storage capacity and performance to match these requirements.

EMC provided a slightly alternative solution using all-flash negating all disk I/O, latency, and contention issues. We have seen a huge performance increase due to all-flash that is beyond what was anticipated. In three years, when the storage is close to its limits capacity-wise, performance will be greater than necessary.

The SAN provided by EMC exceeded our expectations. The only room for improvement I can see would be a faster leader time and lower cost. However, even with the lead time we had (which was approximately 10 days at the time of order) and cost we are very satisfied with the product.

I have used EMC Unity since June, 2016.

We have not had any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability problems.

Technical support is excellent. They have rapid response teams, ESRs, and the EMC account managers are always available.

We had no previous SAN solution.

The initial setup was very simple and instructions were provided in both documents and video tutorials.

Licensing ranges from $20K plus for a decent configuration. AFA configurations start at about $25K.

We looked at multiple vendors including NetApp, HPE, IBM, and Nimble.

There is currently a long lead time on 3TB SSD disks due to a shortage of materials in the USA.

We were able to consolidate from multiple types of disks into a single group of disks of the same speed. Now, we do not have to worry about preparing pools of disks for each server application. Instead, they are all using the same disks but getting a faster response due to the nature of the solid-state drives.

I like the fact that you can use a solid-state array (all-flash array) for your servers. It has a very intuitive web console that runs in HTML5 and makes navigation and administration fairly easy.

This product lacks deduplication and compression at the current version 4.1.0. LACP is not available for iSCSI either.

The previous version to 4.1.0 caused the array to stop responding during the code upgrade.

We have had no scalability issues so far.

The merger between Dell and EMC caused some issues with support tickets not getting assigned properly. The last few months the support has improved.

Although, we cannot compare them one to one, we were using Celerra NS-480 and now we are using EMC Unity. The main reason, we switched platforms was due to EMC end-of-life support for the Celerra NS-480 as December 31, 2016.

The initial configuration was quick since we took time to prepare the project plan that states what we need to start the installation. We had some challenges when connecting the ESRS gateways to monitor and manage these arrays.

This unit is one of the cheapest storage all-flash arrays in the market and it does well for what it is intended. It can be combined for both file and block storage.

I looked into EMC VNX, NetApp, Isilon, Qumulo, Pure Storage, Nimble Storage, and Tegile.

Learn about the product and its capabilities. If you are unsure whether this will handle your workload, my suggestion is to get a proof-of-concept with your preferred value added reseller. Move some workload to it and test the performance. There is nothing worse than buying a unit that won’t perform as you expect it.

Unity is utilized primarily for our vSphere/vCenter environment. It is where we keep all of our data stores and all of our LUNs and anything to do with our vSphere environment. We really don't usually assign any LUNs directly to servers.

We have a large cluster environment and these are active clusters. There are times where the SQL cluster environment starts to get full and it's really easy to add a LUN or space without interruption. The customer is not even aware that the volume is about to run out of space. We can always just add more space and do data recovery for DRs without the customer's knowledge.

One of the features that I find most valuable is that it is easy to access. We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity.

The solution has been around in our environment for about five years. I've only been exposed to it for the past year and a half.

My impression of the stability is all positive.

We can always add more storage or more devices or more disks. There's always room for growth and it's easy to implement.

This is our primary source of storage and we plan to increase our usage. There's an objective coming in 2022 to increase storage. We have several terabytes and we are constantly chewing that up so there is an effort underway to expand.

I would like it to be a little bit easier to contact support. We can contact support, but we have to go through a phone tree. We get routed to different places. I might call support to say that I need a drive replaced and get transferred to three different groups before I get to the group I actually need.

Once we are able to get in touch with someone, and we have an engineer working with us, it's great the way they follow up. They constantly keep in touch with us whenever we have issues. They help schedule any type of upgrades and get them implemented. Overall, support has been very helpful.

And anytime there are notices of updates and upgrades, support keeps us involved and engaged.

Positive

We went to the Unity because of cost. I wasn't involved in the purchase of it, but the VPLEX maintenance was getting costly and it felt like the Unity was newer technology. The technology was better, the interface was better, interacting with it was better. It is a lot easier to use than the VPLEX. We figured it was a better solution than what we had and one that gave us more flexibility

The initial setup was straightforward. It was very easy to set up.

Ours was a pretty large deployment. The Unity replaced our VPLEX environment so when we put the Unity in we had to do a lot of migration conversion from VPLEX to Unity. That was a process because we had a lot of VMs and data stores move. It took us about a day and a half to do everything.

We have five engineers who work on it, or who actually touch it or provide hands-on support for it. As far as the end-users go, we have about 500, and they have no idea they're on a Unity. What they know is that when they pull their machines up, they have storage and data.

We used CDW. Our experience with them was outstanding. They're great. I have no issues at all. CDW just did an outstanding job.

The return on investment is in the fact that it meets all of our storage needs and in the ease of expanding it. It's also seen through the fact that we can work on the environment without interruption to the end-user.

Do your due diligence. Check it out to see if Unity is something you can use for your environment. It is definitely worth looking into. Give it a try.

As far as the solution's functionality goes, I see no areas in need of improvement. Everything is functioning completely adequately. I have no complaints and no issues. I have no negative feedback. The implementation was easy and straightforward. Doing our recovery points is pretty straightforward. It is easy to access through a browser. We can add and remove LUNs on-the-fly with no impact at all to our environment.

We use this solution for remote sites with greater than 20TB & less than 100TB in block storage requirements. We utilize Dell EMC Unity 350f for ESX hosts and some CIFS & NFS NAS needs. We also use these arrays for DR needs to help control cost for primary block storage needs.

The Unity Arrays are easy to deploy and maintain. The All-Flash models are intuitive and easy to work with, in addition to providing high IOPS with low latency to support Business Critical applications. Because of the newer features and performance, it's easy to maintain and support remotely.

The All-Flash models are pretty fast for the vast majority of our remote workloads.
Encryption (data at rest - DAR) is easy to implement and has very little performance overhead.

CloudIQ SaaS is also a nice touch and is available for free. You can remotely monitor the health and performance of the arrays online or via a mobile app.

We would like to see the concept of Storage Groups brought back to this product line. Manually assigning new LUNs & removing LUNs at sites with a few ESX hosts in a cluster is fairly easy and straightforward, but when you have large clusters with twenty to thirty hosts, this becomes a burden.  Because of this, we have limited the use of Unity systems in our larger data centers.

Between two and three years.

We use it for SAN and NAS, pretty much all of our VMware and ERP systems; everything for storage. It' working out very well. We just moved into it

They've integrated NAS and SAN pretty well. It made replication very simple. Because one of our systems has a lot of LANs, for it to replicate we have Consistency Groups in there. That's something that is really helpful, making sure that everything is working, not just for replication but for backups as well. Pretty much everything we need is there.

We're probably going to be looking into vSAN just to minimize the footprint. We've already minimized the footprint going from VNX to the Unity, but as we're virtualizing more and more, once we're completely virtualized, we'd probably be looking into vSAN through either VxRail or VxRack, and go that way. The smaller the footprint at the data center, the less cost there is.

So far, we've had no issues. We've been running the Unity for about half a year now; no issues with stability at all.

We've only had it for a short time so we haven't had to scale up. We got it scaled to our needs with a little bit of growth put on there.

The team that we got to help us implement it were spot on. They really did do a great job. There were a few cases where we had to pull in some more experienced guys for the networking aspect of it, for the NAS, as there were some issues. But everything else was spot on.

The initial setup was fairly simple because they were able to take all of our information from the VNX and size it appropriately, have all the LUNs set up. The only complex part about it was how we were going to do the SAN to SAN replication, which involved getting everybody on all of the equipment on the latest code, to make sure that we could actually go ahead and replicate. That took some extra work to get that done, but in the end, it was all taken care of and we got replication going.

The pricing is reasonable. We're using the Flex on Demand pricing. It's really good for us when we pay for what we use. It made it easy to get it inside since it's an OpEx and instead of CapEx expense.

I can't say enough about the Flex on Demand because it gives you the agility you need. You can get it in there so easily. You don't have to be fighting with the CFO about how much it costs. It's a lot easier.

It's a really good buy.

We're about to replace a VNX with a Unity in our DR facility. We love that it's only taking about half a rack of space versus the rack-and-a-half that we have for the VNX. That's really good. We're going to be doing SAN to SAN replication. We currently have that going on between the Unity and the VNX using RecoverPoint Appliances, but then it's going to be Unity to Unity after we're done.

I'm very happy with the Unity right now.