Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

This was for our SAN storage. Pretty much everything runs on this: databases, servers, etc.

We have resolved IT challenges with this solution. It sped up our environment. We went from spinning disk to all-flash, which reduced our footprint.

The software is very easy to use.

• Space
• Ease of use
• Snapshots
• Replication between sites
• It is very seamless.

We would like to see the synchronous replication process included in the next release. Not having this downgraded our performance by 65 percent. This really needs to be improved.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

The technical support is really good. I can open up a chat support session with them, then they can either resolve it or turn it into a ticket.

We previously had the VNX5700, which was seven years old. It was at end-of-life, and we had maxed out its capacity.

The initial setup was straightforward for the most part. Because we can do synchronous replication between the two sites, this made the setup challenging for this piece. They did not know how to set this up initially. We ended up having to do bidirectional synchronous replication. 

We used Data Blue (previously LPS), as our integrator, to do the installation for our deployment. They worked with our onsite Dell EMC representatives.

Our costs are roughly $200,000 a year.

We narrowed it down to Hitachi and Dell EMC. We put it out to bid and Dell EMC won.

Overall, it is good product.

If you are doing asynchronous replication, this is a great solution. If you are looking for a synchronous replication solution, I would recommend PowerMax.

The primary use case is NAS.

We use it for its quality and NAS.

It has good performance.

The solution is extremely functional for the price that we pay for it. It is worth the investment.

The application's administration needs improvement and become better. It previously was better.

It is not stable enough.

Dell EMC has good technical support. We haven't had to use it for this product, but we have use it for other products and not had any problems.

The initial setup and migration were straightforward.

The cost of it is good for us.

We purchased a five-year warranty.

We picked Unity, as it is a mature, established solution.

Research the other products that Dell EMC offers, as there is a wide variety.

Our primary use case is for our data center and hypervisor cluster.

We can get almost real-time response times.

We are just getting ready to leverage Cloud Tier.

Deduplication is the biggest thing for our company.

It is easy to use.

Compression is making a difference towards the amount of hardware that we need to purchase.

We love our snapshots and the CloudIQ function is great.

I don't think we are really pushing our Unity, which we have discussed with Dell EMC.

I would like them to continue to build on the solution and expand on the functionality, like replication.

Our hypervisor cluster has 13 nodes. We have some file level and front-end services.

We leverage the iSCSI and Fibre Channel functionalities for scalability.

Dell EMC technical support is pretty quick.

We use it for both file and block in a converged system, supporting a VMware environment and virtualization. VMware is the primary use case.

We have deployed it at remote locations; in a converged platform it really helps. We don't have to have two different storage system which helps to minimize the footprint.

It is a platform that we have standardized on for remote sites which enables us to have engineers and admins who are trained on and knowledgeable about the platform across the board. That enables them to support those sites, which is super-beneficial for us because we can do more with less.

The ability to mix and match SSDs with flash, and spinning disk in there as well, really allows us to meet our performance requirements.

Overall, the most valuable thing for our use case is the flexibility to have multiple-protocol support.

We'd like to see a cheaper version of an all-flash array in that footprint.

It's very stable. We haven't had any major issues with downtime.

It scales very well. It's built into the model line which allows you to scale as necessary. You can choose the model you need to scale with your needs.

Dell EMC's tech support is awesome. We've used both onsite help and remote phone support and I have nothing but great things to say about them.

The setup was really straightforward. We have a long history of using the Dell EMC product line so we are very familiar with the platforms and how they work. This was just the next evolution.

I give the solution an eight out of ten because it meets our use case very well. But it's an eight because nothing is perfect. There is always room for improvement, whether that be in the UI or something else.

We are using it mostly for VMware and Wintel. It is also for applications, like SQL, which need to be used on multiple different operating system, such as Windows, Linux, and sometimes Citrix. We use it with virtualized infrastructure.

We use QoS and snapshots features, which I like.

Unity provides a complete storage solution for VMware on a Wintel Windows box for various applications, such as SQL or Patron Databases. It is seamless, and it sits there providing all the storage and connectivity, so we can forget about it. Unity takes care of itself, solving all the basic needs of a robust infrastructure.

It is easy to deploy. That is the best feature that I like, because I used to fly into locations to install a Unity. We used to have an expense of $5,000 on the product. Now, I just send whomever is onsite over there locally with the initialization information in a text file. Then, they can put it in a USB drive, come back, and it's deployed. Afterwards, I can remotely access it, saving us $5,000 every time. It is not very expensive, so the value added is you get big bang for your buck.

If I can connect to my Unity through my iPad or my cellphone to check everything is okay and view the information via a dashboard. 

I would like to have secure mobile connectivity going forward. This would help me be more proactive.

It is pretty stable. I like the stability, because everything works like it should. We made it all redundant. So, we don't have anything to worry about.

We are so virtual that we have two of us managing the whole infrastructure. Everything is taken care of and highly available. Nothing is vulnerable at all. Everything is good. There have been no issues at all, so far.

We have 30 to 40 Unities out there in the field. We don't even scratch the full capabilities of the Unity. We are at about 20 to 30 percent utilization. It is just provisioned so well that we are sitting at 90 percent performance level. We have it well-provisioned so we don't need to worry about performance for the next five years.

It is quite scalable. If you want to add on, you can add on easily. We have a 25-slot enclosure and are probably at 15 right now. If we purchase a big company, need to scale up, we can easily scale up. 

If there's any issues with a hard drive or any other hardware components, Dell EMC is contacted, then they will call us back to schedule to get into the data center to replace something. This is all virtual. Support is not a problem, because it's automatically taken care of. Only thing we have to do is to give them access to the data center to go do what they need to do to fix it proactively.

The local account team and system engineer are the best part of working with Dell EMC.

Everything is becoming virtual. Then, cloud transformation is being considered right now. Everybody is going over there. We want to evaluate everything, and if the cloud solution is good for us, we'll go there. Everything will be in the cloud.

We have different models of VNX and we have Unity. We use them for file sharing and for block serving in non-production systems.

We don't have a dedicated application running on Unity, but we are using it and file sharing to run multiple systems, but it is not the core. It's used by a lot of applications, but we use it to share files between different applications on different platforms.

We have multiple systems, a heterogeneous environment with Unix and Windows. It's not easy to share multiple files through different platforms. Unity solves this issue.

Also, replication gives us high-availability, and thus quick recovery, and snapshots give us faster recovery within the box, in case there are problems within the box itself.

The valuable features of Unity include:

• it's flexible
• friendly user-interface
• good performance.

It's not complicated. Any beginner can work with this environment.

It is not an enterprise-level solution, it's for mid-range companies, but it includes a lot of features like compression and encryption.

If you compare it with VMAX, where we communicate with the box through Solutions Enabler and there are a lot of commands and a lot of flexibility, the command line for Unity needs to enhanced.

We cannot compare the stability with VMAX or PowerMax, but so far, so good.

The scalability is okay, it's fine. It's not powerful though. We have another product that is more scalable than Unity. It needs to be able to scale out, like the Isilon system and other systems.

Dell EMC has one of the best support organizations, worldwide. We have multiple vendors, but Dell EMC is one of the best. Regardless of whether it's Unity, VMAX, etc., it's fine. We have had very special support from Dell EMC.

We have a good relationship with multiple vendors, but especially with Dell EMC, which is one of the big players. Our main storage is Dell EMC for many reasons. We got Unity because we are happy with the support and with products like VMAX and Isilon. We didn't want to change the technology we are going with.

I was involved in the initial setup with my engineers. It was straightforward. Most products from Dell EMC are straightforward to set up.

We use the Unity to back-end our VMware virtual stack. We run VMware vSphere on it. It's a hypervisor, and that is what we are required to run all our VMs for both Horizon and our internal services.

We were having significant latency with our old storage arrays. With Unity's flexibility of block and file storage, we were able to start with file storage, then plan eventually moving to block storage. So, it has sped up our entire architecture.

Speed and ease of use of the interface are its most valuable features.

The Unity interface is much more advanced than some of the older ones that we had, or that I've experienced. It has made deployment, configuration, and maintenance a lot simpler.

For private cloud, it works very well.

There were a couple features that came out a little later than we originally believed, but they did come pretty much on time and met our schedule.

Like any other storage array, SAN, or NAS, it is very reliable. We haven't had any issues with it.

We know that we can add another whole tray or two of disks if we need to. We started with a high-density to begin with, but we knew we had significant space to expand when we needed it.

It has exceeded our performance expectations. We were expecting an improvement, but we were expecting to eventually in the short term come close to hitting capacity on it, and we haven't. Performance-wise, it's held up very well.

The support that we get for Dell EMC storage has been fantastic.

We were previously using NetApp, and we were at the limit of our old equipment. We were running older file storage, which was causing us a bunch of latency issues, and the Unity solved most of those problems.

The initial setup is not so straightforward if you don't have experience with storage arrays.

We used a Dell EMC consultant for the deployment. The experience was good.

The return on the investment was simply speeding up our entire vSphere stack, which allowed our developers and engineers to get their workloads done faster and simpler. We were experiencing VM snapshot times of 45 minutes to two or three hours, and it shrunk it down to under five minutes.

Based on the cost and performance the we needed, Unity was the best price. NetApp was not being price competitive.

If you're looking for a cost-effective, easy to use solution, which has scalability on a small-to-medium deployment, Unity is a very good solution for this.

We are planning to use replication very soon, and we do use snapshots.

We've been very happy.

We are using the All-Flash storage for block and file use cases. All of our corporate file shares and all of our VMware infrastructure items for manager service platforms are running off of Unity.

We are running a hosted collaboration: video, voice, and all types of online collaboration solutions for our customers. We have been doing it for years and just needed to migrate to the next level. 

It has improved the utilization of our own internal resources and performance across our managed service platform, meeting our customers SLAs.

Unity has reduced the complexity and improved productivity tenfold compared to what it used to be. 

Our tech team is small and very busy, so it is about ease of use. The Unity came in, and its very easy to use and expand. We can expand one drive at a time, which has been a cost effective for us along with ease of performance. 

A lot of the Unisphere interfaces are greatly improved in terms of monitoring capabilities, alerting, and ease of use. Setting up the storage and the file system are all just a few clicks away.

There are a lot of cloud options. We make use CloudIQ, which is a nice dashboard for our managed service side of the company to easily review what is going on with the health of things. There are a number of other cloud features, but we don't make use of them today.

The dedupe and compression ratios on the Unity are not quite where we want them. We are getting better data efficiencies on the VNX than we are on the new Unity. We found this a bit interesting. We would like to see improvement there. 

We noticed in the last release of code that there were some inefficiencies around getting our data efficiency up in terms of dedupe and compression.

I don't hear from any of my tech team. We put it in, and it has been stable. We have been through three patch cycles. Junior resources are taking care of it with no issues. Once we show them how it works, very little training is needed to get them up to speed.

We were running it on VNX previously, so it was easy to migrate over to Unity. We went from a hybrid solution to All-Flash.

We were able to downsize the storage utilization and dedupe with compression, then go with a smaller array, increase our performance, and ease of use.

We worked with pretty much all of the major array manufacturers, and I can put my junior resources on it and not worry about them provisioning extra storage, scaling it, and adding to it. I don't hear from them anymore with, "How do I do this?", "Is this correct?", or "I broke it."

I would rate the product an eight out of ten, which is higher than I would rate other arrays in the mid-range space.