Dell Unity XT Room for Improvement
RP
abstract
Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
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Peter Sowerby
Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
It could be a little easier to attach it to a network file system.
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C.
Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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.
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Dell Unity XT
August 2022

Learn what your peers think about Dell Unity XT. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2022.
622,063 professionals have used our research since 2012.
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SAJI NAIR
GM IT Infrastructure at MSSL
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.
View full review »They can certainly improve in terms of monitoring. The monitoring could be improved, and more features could be added.
MB
reviewer1318731
DIrecteur Commerical at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
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.
View full review »PA
Paul Akengo
Storage Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »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.
View full review »FR
Frank R
CIO at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there.
View full review »IO
ITmanager10038
Senior IT Infrastructure & Data Center Operation Engineer at Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), Egypt
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.
View full review »RB
reviewer1338888
Systems Administrator at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
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.
View full review »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.
View full review »PM
reviewer1716639
Assistant Manager Specialist at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The interface and configuration could improve.
View full review »KS
reviewer1103946
Head of Datacenter Department: at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The price of this product can be more cost-effective.
View full review »EB
Egor Bobryshev
Consultancy Department Chief with 201-500 employees
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.
View full review »MG
reviewer1473288
Pre-Sales and Technical Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
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.
HS
reviewer1851864
User at a media company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »MB
reviewer1851870
User
We have used this solution for less than one year so I don't have any improvement suggestions yet.
View full review »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.
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Arnold Domacena
IT Infrastructure Manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »Dell could improve Unity XT by adding support for NVMe.
View full review »In terms of what could be improved, I would say its capacity and its connection.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Dell Unity XT
August 2022

Learn what your peers think about Dell Unity XT. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2022.
622,063 professionals have used our research since 2012.