We use VMware in a number of projects but there isn't very good visualization of the storage from VMware or vice versa. I'm hopeful this improves in the follow on product, PowerStore.

It could be a little easier to attach it to a network file system.

The UEMCLI is not an object-oriented CLI and the more object-rich PowerCLI has been discontinued. Only people with bash experience possibly can operate it. Still nowadays, feeding object from one command into another is still a burden with such CLI. When adding a few disks to a cluster, the CLI is actually standing in the queue for one disk to be added to all, requiring multiple scans on each membering host, before proceeding with the second...and scanning all hosts once again.  One could add all disks at once and stand in the queue once for a rescan all.

There isn't a means to add volumegroups , nor hostgroups. A feature that any solution I worked with so far has. Its a burden to assure each host has the same LUN ID on each host in this manner. As of the june 2021 releae , code OE 5.1 it seems to offer the option to have hostgroups in the end !

The integration with vCenter comes with a sideeffect, in that it will take control of the vSphere scan process, moreover every esx host is scanned multiple times. It takes easiliy a few hours to add a few LUNS to a few hosts. Rather Painfull. Even when adding LUNs using the unisphere GUI , you can keep up with the pace of your script.

Support Responsiveness & time to fix bugs should be improved. Over the past 1,5 yrs we had occassional controller reboots and we went all the way from OE 4.5 over 5.02 to 5.03 and eliminated the  most common causes. We still face a stress triggered cache merge issue and though we provided the dumps and engineering acknowledged the bug, it has been told that addressing the bug requires substantial code rewritting and the problem will be fixed in the next major code release (OE 6.x) . We are now a year later, still no fix, but furtunately faced the considition once on one out of 5 arrays during that year. 

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. 

They can certainly improve in terms of monitoring. The monitoring could be improved, and more features could be added.

I have a problem because between the Unity XT and the PowerMax, sometimes we need another product between these two products. There could be better integrated and the capacity of the size could be larger.

In the future, if NVMe disc could be used on the Dell EMC Unity XT it would be beneficial.

One area of improvement is replication. We are also using Oracle virtual machines, and when you are using systems from other vendors, the process of replicating from Unity through OLVM is more laborious than when we were using VPLEX. It takes a little more work when we are incorporating a third-party environment. 

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.

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

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.

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.

Currently, the protocol SNMP is not implemented. That's a problem, as we follow this protocol and I can't check the integrity of this equipment.

The interface and configuration could improve.

The price of this product can be more cost-effective.

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.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say the deduplication part, because for large deduplications, you need an extra appliance to do it in order to avoid having problems in performance. I think that could be improved, because everything should be included in the product, not with an appliance from the outside.

This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for. 

I have a limited budget for IT solutions so it would be great to provide Dell's solutions at a lower cost. 

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

An area for improvement is the available capacity. If a customer goes with a base model, which would have its own limit, they could not go beyond the model-supported capacity, so an increase would be good.

Dell EMC Unity XT should present a path or a roadmap on how they could put their products on the cloud. This would have some value for their current customers.

Dell could improve Unity XT by adding support for NVMe.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say its capacity and its connection.