Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We use it for the hosted data store in VMware environments. I also work with it as a solution itself.

It's easy to use, easy to manage, easy to troubleshoot, and the process support is good. 

We can run our environment as we need and run it in the whole flash. Unity is dynamic. We can only save the usable capacity on Unity. 

We need to improve the controller to work as active-active. We also need to improve the snapshot on the Unity site.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for eight years. 

It is a scalable solution. One engineer and one technician work on this solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes three to four hours.

The technical support team is fast and responsive. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I've been working with this solution for about six to seven years. It is deployed on-premises and on the cloud.

It is scalable, and we usually recommend Dell Unity XT to small and medium companies.

I would rate technical support at eight out of ten.

Positive

It takes about eight hours to get Dell Unity XT up and running. Fine tuning may take longer.

The installation can be managed by two people and the configuration by one person.

It's an expensive solution, particularly for medium companies. One device costs about 30,000 euros. The support contract is quite expensive as well. We are currently looking for other lower-cost solutions.

Overall, I would rate Dell Unity XT at six out of ten because it's an expensive solution.

It's used for general storage or backup storage throughout the environment.

Inline data reduction is pretty impressive.

The user interface could be improved. The Dell Compellent user interface is fantastic, but the Unity user interface is, in comparison, pretty lousy. It's functional, and I can do what I need, but the Dell Compellent user interface is so much more intuitive and user-friendly.

I wish that the product had some more flexibility. It seems it's purposely designed to not have a lot of flexibility, and as a customer, I don't appreciate it.

I have been using this solution for three years or so.

I've had some unexpected quirkiness, but for the most part, it's pretty good. Its stability is an eight out of ten.

As long as you're buying the right product, it's probably an eight out of ten in terms of scalability. What you don't want to do is get locked into something you don't want. If you want a hybrid, such as a spinning disk in a solid state, you have to know that upfront. That's because some of the models restrict to only SSD. Later on or down the road, if you want the spinning disk for cold storage, it doesn't happen. You can't convert it. You have to get a different array or something else.

Their technical support can be very good. It depends on who you get, but that's how it's with any support organization. The individual makes a difference, but generally, their support has been pretty good. The only thing that I don't like is that you sometimes have to wait to get to a support engineer, but they've gotten better at that.

I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of the ease of the setup.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

We propose this solution when customers need to expand their workload or storage.

It is great because it can work as a SAN and net storage.

It is expensive, and the pricing could be better.

We have been using this solution for three years, and most companies in Egypt partner with Dell EMC. It is the main storage solution that we sell to customers. It is deployed on-premises.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the scalability a nine out of ten, and we have more than 80 customers in Egypt.

There is a good ROI if the customer has critical applications and file storage.

The licensing is included in the appliance, and I rate the licensing costs an eight out of ten.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten and recommend it to others.

Dell Unity XT is used for almost all types of mid-range requirements, such as databases, virtualization, file services, and other applications, for example, exchange servers.

Dell Unity XT has unified storage which provides both blocks, and file protocols, which helps to get rid of separate storage for each purpose.

The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is its support of protocols for both block, and file levels. It has the features a store solution should have.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for approximately five years.

The stability of Dell Unity XT is great. We have not received any complaints about errors or failures in deployments.

We have more than 10 customers using Dell Unity XT. We are focusing on Dell PowerStore more because it is a newer product. We would like to convert our customers from Dell Unity XT to Dell PowerStore.

The scalability of Dell Unity XT is very good.

I rate the scalability of Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

I rate technical support from Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

Positive

Dell Unity XT is straightforward to set up.

One person can handle the configuration and deployment, but a helper is needed for rack mounting and cabling.

The features of Dell Unity XT allow support of both block-level and file-level protocols and provides a good return on investment because customers don't need to purchase separate storage systems for each protocol.

The pricing of Dell Unity XT is good.

I rate the price of Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

If a customer is considering implementing Dell Unity XT, I would advise them to also purchase the implementation from professionals to receive the best results.

I rate Dell Unity XT an eight out of ten.

Dell Unity XT is used via iSCSI as a storage system for our infrastructure.

The most valuable features of Dell Unity XT are the data compression for all of our VMs up to four times and the performance is good.

The price of Dell Unity XT could improve.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for approximately one year.

Dell Unity XT is a stable solution.

The scalability of Dell Unity XT is good, it can scale well.

We have many VMs that are using the solution. We have plans to increase the usage of the solution.

I have not used the support from Dell Unity XT.

We used other Dell solutions prior to Dell Unity XT and we use Synology for more simple projects.

The initial setup of Dell Unity XT is straightforward.

We did the deployment of Dell Unity XT in-house. We have three engineers that do the maintenance and support of the solution.

The price of Dell Unity XT could improve. However, it is a one-time purchase.

I rate Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for block storage delivery to the cloud.

This solution provided us with the capability to manage expiring equipment that we didn't have before.

This is a tier-three solution and it gives us what we need for archiving and backups.

We have used this solution for less than one year so I don't have any improvement suggestions yet.

I have used this solution for less than one year. 

The technical support for this solution is good. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I have previously used HPE 3PAR 7400. We switched over to Dell Unity because 7400 was being retired and did not offer two-factor authentication. The biggest difference between the two solutions is security and Dell is offered at a lower price point. 

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment took less than two days. However, to get all the paperwork through the government officials took about six weeks.

We evaluated HPE Nimble.

Generally, one person is required to do the maintenance. There are eight of us that can do the maintenance in our company. Overall this solution provides exactly what we needed, which is fiber channel block storage in the cloud.

I would rate this solution a seven 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.