Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

What I found most valuable from Dell EMC Unity XT is its easy management through its multi-cloud support. They also offer remote support or secure remote services, which I also find valuable. The support they provide their users is very good, and they'll really help whenever you need support.

I've been working with Dell EMC Unity XT for six years.

This product is stable on production.

Dell EMC Unity XT has some scalability issues which they need to address.

Before you can get support for Dell EMC Unity XT and other Dell EMC products, you have to spend time looking for the service tag number on your product, and this is a process that makes it difficult to access support, but once you gain access, they'll provide you with very good support.

The initial setup for this product was easy and didn't involve any complexity.

Dell EMC Unity XT is being used both in our company and the companies of our customers. We work with our customers, though I'm moving to another company, but I'm still integrating this product, e.g. it's being used in-house.

There is some dependency on the storage side.

We only have two people in the company working on this product.

The price for Dell EMC Unity XT being higher or lower depends on the partner negotiations.

I'm giving Dell EMC Unity XT a rating of 10 out of 10. It's stable and it's a very innovative product.

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.

We were looking for an option for an all-flash array with a lower cost than the XTremIO.

It's easier to administer than some of the alternatives that we had. The teams find it easy to manage. We're a big EMC shop anyway, so for us it was just a lower-tier alternative at a good performance point for the price.

We are leveraging its integration with other applications and there were no significant costs to do so.

The most valuable feature is the performance. It's still an all-flash array at a good price point.

It needs deduplication. We'd like to have the dedupe capabilities in the Unity.

It's very stable. No issues with it.

It's been acceptable in terms of scalability as well. We've found that it's easy to expand and not too expensive.

Dell EMC, generally, is good from a technical support perspective. We really never have issues.

It's hard to say what our ROI is. We don't do a lot of hard ROI.

The pricing is competitive. We miss some of the feature functionality that we had with the XtremeIOs but it's certainly suitable for the purpose.

Weigh your options. The landscape has changed a lot since we bought it, it's been a couple of years. It's a good product but you will certainly want to survey the landscape.

The most important criteria when choosing a vendor include the longevity of the product, certainly ongoing support as well. I've got a good relationship with Dell EMC, we like the product. If I'm not mistaken it was based on the VNX platform; it's basically an all-flash version. We had some familiarity with it and the all-flash piece was very compelling.

I would rate it at eight out of ten. There are just a few features that we'd like to see at that price point. But generally, it has been pretty stable.

It is for our production. We also have a second one for disaster recovery. We use it for our VMware storage.

It's done everything we need and we have had no issues.

Since we have gone virtual, we've been using the SAN and the speed on our servers has increased along with the time to reboot and time for maintenance. We have built in our company's backup redundancies and the SANs both have Unities with replication, which has benefited with speed and reliability.

• Speed
• Reliability
• Support

It is easy to manage overall. It is all web-based. It has a an easy, nice dashboard. I receive emails if there are issues. When there are any updates, I receive emails. I can either do them on my own, but normally I schedule them with Dell EMC and they remote in, then it's done.

If there's anything Dell EMC could do to get the same performance for a cheaper price, that would be great.

It's awesome. It hasn't missed a beat. We haven't had any issues with it whatsoever. Speed has been great. It does everything we need.

There has been no downtime. It has built-in redundancy upon redundancy, so I feel very confident with it.

I'm using 25% of the available space for that drive. I can scale it as far as money could spend, as far as I can tell.

Their support cases are all handed through the portal. The support contacts me when they need to do upgrades. It has been great. It's all very well-handled, scheduled, and performed.

It's all been email-based portal cases. When they schedule remote sessions, they're on time. They get the job done and have been helpful every time I've needed them. I give them an A+ for support.

We were not using anything previously. We had 15 physical servers previously, so we knew it was time to change. This was part of a VMware virtualization project with SAN for the storage, so it made sense for us to go physical to virtual and use EMC Dell.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The vendor implemented it and is knowledgeable.

By doing virtual and reducing our footprint of servers, we're definitely not pulling as much power as we were. The time savings of not having to do virtual reboots rather than physical reboots of boxes. 

ROI probably has been more in time and uptime than in dollars saved. We have definitely had more uptime in the past year since we've been on this than we've had in previous years.

Dell EMC has a great portal for the licensing. It's very logical and easy to license. 

We integrated it with VMware vSphere at no additional cost. As we moved into VMware vSphere, this is what we bought to go with it for our storage performance.

When we were purchasing the product, we didn't have a capital budget for it. I sat down with my boss (the COO), and went over upcoming projects. We looked over the dollar values and if they fit. If it does fit, we do it. We went with the VAR that sold Dell EMC in our city and from there it was done. This made it very easy.

If it fits your budget, do it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: brand and support reputation.

The primary use of the solution is 80% block storage and 20% file storage.

The most valuable feature is that the solution is a hybrid system, so you can do both block and file storage.

The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support for the solution is good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

As a partner, we provide the implementation service for our customers.

I give this solution an eight out of ten.

Only one admin person is required for maintenance. 

This robust solution fulfills block and file storage as it is designed to do. I 100% recommend this solution for block storage. There are some limitations with the file storage.

This solution will eventually be changed to a newer solution called PowerStore which will have a new range of storage options.

I provide support for customers in their use of Dell Unity XT.

The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is the GUI, it is very good. End users can manage using it. Additionally, the documentation is of high quality and it integrates well.

Dell Unity XT could improve the compatibility of some of the features. Some of my customers had some problems. Additionally, it would be beneficial for the solution to have advanced AI and ML features.

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

The stability of Dell Unity XT is good.

Dell Unity XT is scalable. We have one customer who has an enterprise company using this solution.

The support from Dell Unity XT is good.

I was working with HPE 3PAR StoreServ previously. If I compare Dell Unity XT to HP 3PAR, they are similar.

The customer we have has approximately 10 administrators support.

I rate Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

We use it for a virtualization environment based on VMware vSphere.

The most valuable features include

• Snapshots
• Thin Clones
• Deduplication and compression.

It could be improved in the area of management flexibility. For example, I really need to set read-only access for LUNs, and there's no such option with Unity XT.

I would also like to see more support for object storage for S3. NetApp includes basic support for S3 to the on-top array, so it would be great if DELL EMC would include S3 for the Unity XT.

I have been using Dell EMC Unity XT for three years.

The stability has completely satisfied us.

The scalability has also satisfied us. We use it extensively. We purchased an expansion last year and added about 150 terabytes and we're going to purchase another expansion next year. We plan to use it until the end of support.

The services on the Unity storage are used worldwide in our organization. We have about 1,500 employees.

Dell EMC's technical support is perfect.

The initial setup was completely straightforward. Anyone who can handle "next, next, next, finish" can deploy Unity. It was deployed within half an hour.

We installed it, connected it to fabric, updated the software, went through the initial configuration dialogue, and that was it. Most of the time in getting it up and running was spent on the data migration.

For deployment and maintenance it requires just one person. In our organization that person is our storage and virtual infrastructure administrator.

We did it ourselves.

It's a great product if it fits your specific needs.

Primarily we use it for our file side storage. It's pretty solid. It's tied into our VMware environment for the virtual storage, but Exchange doesn't run on it. It's mostly just Windows File Servers at this point.

We had some issues with it in the beginning, but Dell EMC took care of them and it has just been sitting there running ever since. We haven't had any real problems since then.

For us, it is cheap and deep. That's really why we wanted it, to get an expanded amount of storage. We also run Xtremes, but they're a lot more expensive. Really, it was the cost-benefit for longterm storage.

The most valuable feature is the ability to provision storage from the CLI, versus having to go in and use the GUI every time. I can just script it out and it will create what I need. That makes it super-easy to manage. 

Also, for us, it's a set-and-forget. Since we provisioned it out, we haven't had to mess with it.

It could always use native replication. Then I could get rid of RecoverPoint.

We had some problems in the beginning, but since they did the code upgrade and the bug fix, it has been solid for the last eight months. We haven't had any issues.

Scaling is easy. If we need more, we just buy another shelf. It's probably not as easy as the Isilon, but it scales well.

Our local SE guy is awesome. Everything we have is set to call home, so that's the set-and-forget for us. If there's an issue that pops up, they immediately send equipment to our SE, and he comes in and replaces it. I never have to mess with it.

Our old arrays, the VNXs - we had a 5400 and a 5700 - were reaching the end of their days, and we wanted to go to the next step up, but not quite to the Xtreme level. Unity was the obvious choice.

When selecting a vendor, support has to be rock solid. And then, ease of use: Do they have all the features we need? Are there any outstanding issues that are going to clash with our onsite stuff (which usually ends up being with AIX)? As far as Dell EMC goes, we've been pretty good with them for a while.

The setup process was pretty straightforward, similar to any other storage device. I don't think there were any special considerations we had.

We've only had it running for not quite a year yet. I can't say, versus our other arrays, if the ROI is better or worse at this point.

We only use Dell EMC and Pure for storage. We went with Dell EMC because of cost. We have an aging Isilon that we're also replacing. We do have Pure, we do the flash array there, but that's quite expensive compared to the Unity. What we needed was dependable cheap and deep storage.

It really depends on your specific needs: if it's speed or if it's longterm storage. Dell EMC has a whole array of products. I would say go for it. We used to push the Isilon a lot, that's super cheap and deep, and that's been rock solid as well, but you lose that block functionality. You really need to go to the Unity. I would definitely do the Unity over the SC.

It was pretty easy to order. We got rezoned when Dell took over, so our sales rep is out of a different state. But, as far as going through our partner, it was perfectly fine, like any other normal purchase.

I would rate the Unity at about seven out of ten, once the bugs were fixed. To be a ten it would need native replication.