Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

The product is stable. Its most valuable feature is the storage alarm.

Dell Unity XT’s price needs improvement.

We have been using Dell Unity XT for five to six years. We are using version 380.

I rate the product’s stability nine out of ten.

We have 8000 Dell Unity XT users. I rate the product’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The product has an easy setup process. It requires two people to execute it and takes a day to complete.

I rate Dell Unity XT’s pricing a nine out of ten.

We evaluated HP and NetApp.

I rate Dell Unity XT an eight out of ten.

We used Dell EMC Unity XT for onsite storage.

We were moving from our HP3 power data center to a hybrid cloud solution. We still needed some onsite storage, but we wanted faster performance and a more efficient capacity. The flash storage generally outclasses older solutions, which was why we went down the flash storage route.

Having gone down the flash storage route, we liked Dell EMC Unity XT because of its speed and efficiency. We did compare it with Pure, but we liked Dell because Pure is more niche, while Dell EMC Unity XT is more general purpose. We can also buy other things from Dell, and we get better prices from them, compared to Pure. In Pure, you can only buy storage. These are the things we liked about this product.

Dell operates at the commodity end of the market, so if they really want to get into storage in a big way, they need to have better pre-sales technical support and engagement.

They do what they say, but if it was a really big implementation, I would be worried about recommending Dell EMC Unity XT, simply because we need to have a more technical understanding of it. The technical engagement can be a lot better.

Dell EMC Unity XT is a stable product.

Dell EMC Unity XT has good scalability.

The technical support for this product is fine.

There is an annual charge for the license of this product. It has better pricing than its competitor: Pure Storage.

We evaluated Pure Storage.

I'm in IT and my niche is digital transformation consulting. One of my customers needed a storage solution, so I recommended Dell EMC Unity XT. I'm not a storage consultant. I'm a digital transformation consultant, and one of my clients needed a storage solution.

I'm not a user of this product. My clients might need a solution from time to time, and what I do is I recommend solutions.

Dell EMC Unity XT is a good product.

I didn't get involved in the initial setup of this product, but I believe it was straightforward. It only took one to two days for the installation, then we were able to migrate our data.

I can recommend this product to others looking into implementing it.

I'm giving Dell EMC Unity XT a score of seven out of ten.

One advantage was the ability to use different types of disks and different types of disk solutions to increase the speed, first of all, and to take advantage of different storage costs across the life cycle of the data.

• One of the most useful features for us was the deduplication. It had been challenging for us to store certain types of data and to use patterns of storage to reduce storage size.
• The IOPS and the speed were also an important part of the solution.
• In addition, there was a Unity machine that offers block-level and NAS, and we used the block-level storage.
• We also use the side-to-side storage verification for the recovery site.
  
• Finally, the device was flexible and we could change the configuration to meet our needs.

Our request to Dell EMC for improvement was in the reporting and monitoring areas. Dell EMC built up a cloud ID so that we could see the overall storage numbers. We needed to have the proper KPIs to be able to see and manage things.

I worked with Dell EMC Unity XT for two to three months. My last role was IT director so I didn't do a lot of hands-on with the devices. I was overseeing the IT staff and doing project management for these kinds of solutions. At that time I was working for a manufacturing company for pharmaceutical life cycle products, and we were a customer of Dell EMC.

There was no problem with the stability. It was, as expected, very strong.

You can grow as much as you like. There is no limit. It's easy to scale.

We had about 1,000 users of the Unity XT.

We did not need to contact their technical support.

The initial setup for Unity XT was pretty straightforward. We knew exactly what we needed and our requirements were very easily applied to the box. With one day of hands-on training, my colleagues were able to manage things.

Maintenance required one person.

We used an integrator for the deployment. They had great knowledge of the product. We also did some additional integration with them in other parts of the storage, including backup and data domain devices, because we were very fond of the work they did.

The main factors to consider are space, availability, business continuity, performance, and IOPS. The Unity XT box is very strong. It doesn't break. The MTBF time is very large so you don't have to worry about faults or outages in your operations.

It is a very complete platform. Dell EMC wrote a new OS for storage, but I haven't seen it yet.

We looked at HPE Nimble but the price of the Unity XT was very good compared to the competition.

It is for a customer who does virtualization.

We use replication for disaster recovery (DR), making our DR process much easier.

Price and performance are its most valuable features.

It streamlines processes.

I haven't seen the roadmap for this solution.

It has met our overall performance expectations. The solution runs as we need it to, without any issues. It hasn't failed.

We haven't tried scaling yet.

The technical support is good.

We had performance issues with our previous product, which is why we started to search for a new solution when we did a reorganization. We decided on this solution because of the performance that we receive from the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward: Just connect, plug in everything, then do the configuration wizard.

We are integrators.

Our CAPEX was close to $42,000 and operating costs are below $1000.

We also evaluated HPE and Lenovo.

The product has met all our expectations.

Take a closer look at the price per gigabyte and the performance that you are getting with the solution.

We bought a couple of 450F and 650F to replace our ageing VNX family. The primary use case is for block storage, and VMware for our tier-2 applications.

Moving away from Java-based Unisphere to the HTML5 version of Unity is a huge improvement for our day-to-day management. We are still in the process of getting things in place, but at this stage, I can say the configuration is pretty straightforward and doesn't require additional training to learn the product.

Moving also from a hybrid to an all-flash array helped us to minimize footprints in our data centers. It's like two racks of VNX 8000 down to a quarter rack of Unity 650F.

• New HTML5 GUI: It's really fast and works well on your favorite browsers.
• Data reduction: We haven't seen the actual benefits, but with this feature, we are expecting to gain maximum efficiency.
• CloudIQ integration: This provides really useful data and analysis.

• Storage groups are no longer available in Unity so you will have some challenges if you managed quite a huge environment in provisioning perspective.
• Domain management is also gone in Unity. This is not an issue if you are managing less than two of this, but in our case, we have a number of this array around the globe.
• All models are limited up to two I/O modules per SP giving you fewer front-end ports compare to higher VNX models.
• Unisphere Central is not so useful as we expect. This will provide a centralized management of our arrays, but it ends up giving you only some numbers and figures for you to report to your management.

We added it to our Vblock 740 as a storage extension, basically a tech extension for a capacity upgrade. We set it up about three weeks ago. I haven't seen any issues so far.

What we noticed was that the SP utilization is quite high, although the main load is on a VMAX. We'll need to dig into it with EMC and see if there are any issues that might pop up.

The setup was quite easy, straightforward.

Compression, it's an all-flash Unity, so with that compression feature, it's comparable to a hybrid. That is one thing that we definitely like.

It runs. No stability issues.

If those SP utilization things, noted above, get to be an issue, I think scalability might be an issue too. But we need to confirm that. I don't know yet.

We had a licensing issue to do with encryption but, other than that, we have not had to use tech support. It took a little bit, support had to get it into our ELA. It worked out in the end.

Obviously, it is the successor of the VNX. We wanted to add some mid-range capabilities to that Vblock 740 and it was the logical choice.

In terms of selecting a vendor, we're a big EMC partner, so we don't usually look at other vendors. We have very good experiences with EMC support so far. We are currently not looking at other vendors.

It is definitely worth having a look at. The price-point for all-flash is certainly quite interesting. It has NAS capabilities too, if you need it. It's an interesting product, at least for mid-range.

I provide support for these storage products.

I like that the performance is very good.

It would be better if there were more integrations.

We have been using Dell Unity XT for two and a half years. 

Dell Unity XT is a stable solution.

Dell Unity XT is a scalable solution. 

Technical support is very good. The response from technical support was very good.

Depending on the hardware, it takes about three to four hours to deploy this solution. 

We sometimes use third-party help because we are facing many hardware issues.

We have to apply for a license for each system. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Dell Unity XT a nine.

Unity is our central storage solution. All of our data is stored on this platform, so it's not just production servers in DR. We have two DR—near and far—so there are three sites in total. Unity holds all of our transactional data.

My storage team likes Unity's replication features. Three-site replication is a unique feature that EMC offers us.

We've been using Unity storage for almost 10 years.

Unity is very stable. 

Unity is scalable. 

I would rate Dell EMC support seven out of 10. We had to follow up a lot. We sent an email beforehand, so they knew the model and everything about our environment. We expected them to do better homework and engage with my team. If they had done the implementation like that we could have saved a lot of time. That is why I rate them seven and not nine or eight.

Implementing Unity isn't straightforward, but it's not that complex, either. There is still some room to expedite the implementation process a bit. We had support from EMC guys in India or Singapore. They worked with our bank's in-house storage team, which has about four members. 

Our contract included training, and we had to pay for that also. It was supposed to be on site, where our team visited EMC somewhere in India or Singapore to get training, but we couldn't do that because of the pandemic, so the training was online. If we get trained next time, we would like to do most of the implementation by ourselves.

We have a perpetual license for Unity and a support contract with Dell EMC. 

I rate Dell EMC Unity XT eight out of 10. We compared Unity with NetApp and HP also. In some areas, NetApp and HP have advantages over EMC. I think NetApp holds the top Gartner position. It's in the upper-right quadrant. 

Also, Dell EMC doesn't have a presence in Bangladesh, so they work through local partners. Previously, they had only one partner with sub-partners or sub-agents. This complicated the relationship with the end customer. We had been working with the same partner for the last eight years, but when we were upgrading, they told us they could no longer support us because they had some issues with EMC. We got caught in the feud between Dell EMC and their partner.

We had to get somebody else appointed as a new partner and then discontinue the earlier partner's agreement to make it commercially feasible. I think EMC should be more careful in appointing partners, and they need to have better control over their partners. And if their partner has some problems with them, we should not suffer.