Dell Unity XT Reviews

This solution is our primary storage for all workloads.

It has good replication and integration with VMware.

This solution makes it easy to manage storage, provision new workloads, and scale-up.

The most valuable feature is the easy management with a great GUI. We can do a lot from there.

This solution would be improved with the addition of flexible raid volumes.

This is a very stable platform, so far zero issues.

We use this solution for remote sites with greater than 20TB & less than 100TB in block storage requirements. We utilize Dell EMC Unity 350f for ESX hosts and some CIFS & NFS NAS needs. We also use these arrays for DR needs to help control cost for primary block storage needs.

The Unity Arrays are easy to deploy and maintain. The All-Flash models are intuitive and easy to work with, in addition to providing high IOPS with low latency to support Business Critical applications. Because of the newer features and performance, it's easy to maintain and support remotely.

The All-Flash models are pretty fast for the vast majority of our remote workloads.
Encryption (data at rest - DAR) is easy to implement and has very little performance overhead.

CloudIQ SaaS is also a nice touch and is available for free. You can remotely monitor the health and performance of the arrays online or via a mobile app.

We would like to see the concept of Storage Groups brought back to this product line. Manually assigning new LUNs & removing LUNs at sites with a few ESX hosts in a cluster is fairly easy and straightforward, but when you have large clusters with twenty to thirty hosts, this becomes a burden.  Because of this, we have limited the use of Unity systems in our larger data centers.

Between two and three years.

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.

The primary use case is storage.

The solution helps us be more competitive in the market against our competitors.

We use replication.

It has reduced complexity.

It is missing some features, like deduplication.

It is pretty stable.

It can scale.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup has straightforward and complex pieces, such as, the integration. 

We have seen ROI

We don't use the cloud options.

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.

It's our primary storage. It is just for VMWare with a lot of Fail Over clusters.

For our mission critical applications, we run SQL, Oracle, Fail Over server clusters, VMWare, and databases. We use it for our primary VMWare environments, with a VPLEX, just for failover and performance. We use it for Windows Plus! because you need shared storage. In addition, we use it for healthcare systems.

We only use it for block storage. We don't use any other features. We have a VPLEX for applications.

Unity is supporting the organization, but it's not improving it. It's just hosting the applications.

Simplicity: It is ease to use. It performs. It's easy to provision, and It's stable.

I would like better monitoring capabilities: more historical data with more insight into the performance for the database. We now use a separate tool for it. Therefore, it would be nice if we could have that straight from the tool.

The stability is good. We are very happy with the Unity.

It does what it says it does. It performs, so you never have performance problems with it.

It scales, but then you have to buy additional stuff. So, if we need it, we can scale it. That is not the issue. However, we don't need it to scale further, because when I scaled it down, there are multiple platforms that we will move off the Unity to a hyper-converged or Isilon solution. Scalability isn't that important.

The technical support is good.

It's quite straightforward. It's deciding some IP addresses and building a storage pool, then you're off.

We always buy it with implementation services. However, we did the implementation ourselves.

With the large Unity that we bought, it has saved us about one and a half rack space. That's our return on investment on our flash array. We also need less Fibre Channel connectivity.

We had VPLEX, and it's a good merge with Unity. So, we didn't look very much further.

We also looked at HPE and Hitachi. We went with Dell EMC since we are a Dell EMC house.

It does what it needs to do that is the reason why we bought it.

We are not interested in the cloud option.

We use it for our primary storage platform. All of our primary VMs run off of it.

We went from two boxes that were 8U down to a 2U box. Dell EMC Unity XT reduced the electricity we were using just by making that one change.

On a performance level, with SQL querying, it would take 60 seconds. That doesn't sound like a long time, but when people are staring at a spinning icon they can get outraged. This solution has cut it down to about 22 seconds for a query, so it's a lot faster. The difference was astronomical. We were using an EqualLogic, a hybrid array which had spinning disk and SSD, and the Unity just blew it out of the water.

When it comes to provisioning and management, when you compare Unity to EqualLogic, it's night and day. The EqualLogic wasn't nearly as flexible as Unity is. Once we saw what the Unity was capable of, there was no going back to the EqualLogic at all.

It gives me flexibility with its ability to replicate to itself and the ability to use the Dell EMC Cloud as an option. That's always sitting there and waiting if we need it.

I like the fact that it comes with a cloud option out-of-the-box. Just purchasing it gave us an unlimited amount of storage. It allows us to dip our toes in without a major commitment. With AWS or Azure, you're locked in and you're using up the contract and you're always worried that you'll spend a lot more. The use case for us would be disaster recovery or cold storage.

We use our VMware Site Recovery Manager and we use the device to replicate all of those hot VMs over to our DR site. We've actually tested it and it takes 19 seconds for us to get a virtual machine up and running, in the event of a disaster, because of the replication between the two systems.

What I'd like to see is a little more detail on the networking side. I can go into where it's showing me the replication, but when I go into the network it just gives me broad-based information. I don't know which replication job is actually feeding it. I have to go in and rely on other apps. But I'm thinking, "It's on there. It should be able to tell me this is the one that's eating up the bandwidth."

We've had no issues with the Unity. We haven't had a failed drive yet.

We haven't had to scale it out. We're going to scale it out next year.

We went from a spinning drive array because we needed something faster. We moved our analytic server over to it and the Unity was able to overcome the bottleneck that the previous storage had caused.

Also, EqualLogic went end-of-life, they weren't going to support it anymore. That was our initial driver. But we found we could fix some other issues with the move to Unity.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, or at least we thought it would be. We have some complex stuff that we do on our network which caused some issues with it. That didn't make it a standard, out-of-the-box setup. Had we had a less complex network, it would have been a lot simpler to put it in.

We used a reseller and our experience was fine. It was not the first time we had actually worked with that reseller. We ended up having to engage with the Dell EMC people to get everything set up right. It wasn't the smoothest of introductions.

We looked at all-in-one, hyperconverged storage. We decided not to go that route simply because we've made such a huge investment on the networking side. If we had gone the hyperconverged route we would pretty much have had to rip all that out.

Then we looked at Pure. In the end, we'd been partners with Dell EMC for so long that it didn't make sense to venture out into some unknown when we were talking about the main platform which we were going to build all our VMs off of.

Find out your needs before you look at your options. Everyone's going to tell you theirs is the best but you need to know what you need going in, and what kind of performance level you need. If they're not willing to do a PoC then don't do it. If they're not willing to put their product out there and compare it with another product, then don't even consider them.

I would give it an eight out of ten. It has some deduplication to try to reduce some of the overlap that VMs, by nature, have. But I feel that could be better to try to save on storage. Also, better reclaimed-space management on it would be nice. Reclaimed space on virtual systems can be a pain to manage sometimes.

We use it for our converged infrastructure in our VxBlock.

We put all our applications on it since it is our back-end storage. We have just one storage area that we dump everything on and scrape for all of our mixed workload use.

It is a streamlined single giant storage area. It is all fast, so we can throw all of our mixed workloads at it. It just simplifies the deployment of things because we don't have to sit there and think about where we want to put stuff or what needs what.

Speed and flexibility are the most valuable features.

It has great mixed work load use, which is nice because we keep growing things for our VxBlock. 

It's great on power consumption, as there is no spinning disk. 

It's super-fast, and you can't go wrong with that. It's helped us across the board to standardize on something very simple.

We use all the data service features and click all the options.

As the solution continues to grow and gain more traction, things will come up that will just continue to deepen the integration between VMware, vCenter, and all those other components. Anything in the divisibility there and additional tools is always great.

It is super stable. I haven't had any issues with it.

The scalability is great. We haven't hit any issues with scaling at this point.

Thankfully, we haven't had to deal with technical support yet.

We were standing up a new data center, so it was easier to standardized on one storage subsystem. We had been using VNXe and XtremIO with a mix of other Dell EMC products. It was just nice for this mixed workload use to have a single solution in Unity.

The initial setup was super straightforward. I pointed it where I wanted it to go, and they put it there.

We used VCE for the deployment, and they were great.

It is a brand new data center, so we haven't quite seen the ROI yet. Just from an overall power and heating usage, it costs substantially less than some of our existing solutions.

We only had EMC on our shortlist.

It is lightning fast, low on power and heat, and has a small footprint with great performance.

If you don't know your mixed use case, or what you're going to do with it, it's a nice mixed use storage subsystem. It easily integrates with great visibility. It is very easy to maintain and operate. It is just a nice platform, especially if you're setting yourself in a new direction and you don't quite know what you're doing.

Right now, Unity is a backup target.

The IT challenge we resolved with this solution was having a backup target. With Unity we've got DDVE, or Data Domain Virtual Edition loaded. It was an array that was not being used for anything in particular and we had a need for the data domain capacity, so we're using it as a backup target under DDVE.

The Unity platform is really easy to use. When it comes to provisioning and management, it has reduced complexity and improved productivity. The ease of the UI means it's not a very complicated system to manage.

For me, the most valuable feature is the ease of management. It's a fairly easy system to manage compared to PowerMax or VMAX.

In other use cases for which we used that particular Unity box, before it landed up being what it is now, the data service feature we used most was snapshots. Snapshots made it easy to roll back to a point in time.

We plan to buy Unity again in the next 12 months and we'll have to see what the next generation of Unity brings to us. But so far, there are no additional features needed.

There's always room for improvement with the UI. That can be a little cumbersome at times.

The stability is good.

The scalability is also good.

We haven't had to call technical support. It has been a pretty solid product.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's an easy piece of equipment to manage.

We are enterprise-level and buy directly from Dell EMC.

Our shortlist had IBM XIV Gen2. We landed on Unity because we had familiarity with the product. Unity has its roots in VNX and we had a number of VNX arrays.

Unity is solid and there is not anything to be afraid of in purchasing it. I would recommend it.

Ours is not a very complicated use case and the performance has been adequate for what we've tasked it to do.

I give the Unity a ten out of ten for two reasons:

• reliability
• ease of use.

We use it for data storage, for file.

When it comes to provisioning and management, the solution has reduced complexity because we combined several systems down into one. We're utilizing that technology to see what we have available for file, instead of multiple technologies, and trying to converge all of that together to understand what our capacity management meets are.

Also, Unity's are more easily administrated, so we need fewer people to do the administration. We have less overhead because of that.

We do replication and snapshotting. We're using that as a backup technology to leverage snapshotting.

We went to the PowerMax because of the needs that we have for the business. We're doing true enterprise-level storage. So we went from Unity to PowerMax to give us that tier that we were looking for.

It's stable. It works well.

We had a lot of different solutions. They were all piecemeal'ed. We have manufacturing sites in 80 countries and every site did their own thing until corporate brought it back in. That's when we started to go with Unity. And now we're making the transition to PowerMax.

We use Dell EMC because they're the premier player.

We used one of our premier partners to implement it. 

My advice is to take this solution. It does what it tells you it's going to do.

Instead of using multiple types of backup or file storage, we were trying to combine all of that into Unity. Now we're trying to refresh that again and go with the newer technology, the enterprise-level storage. Unity met our overall performance expectations for what it is, and then we obviously needed the enterprise level, so we're going with the PowerMax now.

I would rate Unity at eight out of ten. Any application or product has room for improvement. I don't see anything out there that's a ten. Unity is functional for what it needs to be.

We use it for replacing legacy storage. It's just a one-for-one.

This is primarily for storage and the data aspect of it.

Dell EMC Unity XT keeps us up and running. That is the big thing.

• Affordability
• Scalability
• Simplicity of use

I don't have any complaints from the customers or end users, who are using this solution. It's up and running with no worries.

We are very fond of the scalability. We are using the Unity 300, which has a limitation. However, if we needed more, we could go to the Unity 400, 500 or 600. We could go down the series until we get the one that meets the size that we need. It has very impressive scalability.

We're not cloud ready yet, but we like the option for the expandability.

We have Dell EMC engineers helping us out and doing some over the shoulder training. They are working with our customer right now doing data migration over to Unities from the legacy Oracle stuff. While they're doing this, they're showing people how the Unities work and the ins and outs of the software interface. 

It's been a really beneficial relationship. We work a lot with Dell EMC, because they are very accommodating. Our Dell EMC representative does what our team doesn't have the capability of doing yet, because they don't have exposure to the product. I look forward to seeing how it works out. 

Our experience recently, with newer products, has been that once they're installed, we haven't had to worry about them. If there has been an issue, like we pulled something out of a box, it's replaced within a matter of days. It's really quick. 

We really push Dell EMC with our customers because of the customer support. It's been very flexible. We always need a lot of data on the stuff that's purchased because we have people buying it on behalf of the customer. They are very good on the customer support acquisition side to provide that data. Also, the technical support that we get is fabulous.

We replaced our legacy storage, which was Oracle. We couldn't afford the maintenance agreement for it any longer. We saved millions of dollars by not going back with Oracle.

This solution has meet our overall performance expectations. We were going for form fit function. We had to meet certain guidelines. We couldn't put anything in bigger. Physically, we couldn't put in any additional capabilities. We had to meet the existing network connectivity without modifying the other systems. The versatility of the product, with the optional PCI inputs allowed us to get that. We are able to scale it up or down, for actual storage, to meet the capacity that we need. We're using it in two cases where we're doing a form fit function. One for replacement, then another for overall modernization of the same systems. We're able to take the same product and scale it up to almost three times its size with very little effort.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. We had a technician helping with migration because of the legacy aspect of the servers, and what they were connecting to. Once the the over the shoulder training is done, the process is fairly straightforward.

We used a reseller and had a consultant. The consultant had worked for Dell EMC and went to work for a consulting company. He is now back to work at Dell EMC. He actually recommended the product based on his knowledge of our program. He flushed the whole system out, as far as the build. Regarding the flexibility of the product, we have other programs within our larger branch which are starting to take on and use the Unities for storage.

The benefit that we have seen is in uptime.

While it has a good price to start, they could always make it cheaper.

We bought extended warranties out of the box because our customer has a bad habit of managing warranties. The service for the small things that we have had are always handled very quickly. 

We were on old Oracle storage and are still on some old Oracle storage. 

There are lots of options for storage solutions, but our technical and customer support team's experience with Dell EMC makes it a no-brainer for us. 

I hate to speak bad of folks, but we can't even get HPE to return our phone calls, in most cases.

Do the due diligence and look at the details: the specs of the product and scalability. There are multiple series of products in the Unity line, which are very simple to use.

It's met all of our expectations. Our users don't have any technical needs because it's up and running. Overall, we are very excited about the product.

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 use this solution for our databases. We also use some of the applications provided. 

It is a hassle-free storage environment that helps us manage our hardware. The upgrades are helpful and it makes our organization a more productive environment. 

We like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. The new features of going off the grid and replicating really help us. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources. 

We would like an AI feature that would protect the backup and minimize the consumed space so that we can maintain the quality of the backup. This would help us minimize our IT cost in terms of backup procedures. 

In addition, we would like to see the solution integrate easier with any cloud provider. There is a rising demand for moving to the hybrid cloud environment and Dell EMC needs to integrate to these needs. 

It is stable. 

It can easily scale up to meet our requirements. 

We have had good experiences with tech support. 

We used VNX previously and although it was fast, the performance was poor. 

It is used for deduplication and encryption.

• Easy to scale
• Easy to maintain

Easy to use management.

I like that it is wizard-driven. In past iterations, it has made it easier to cross-train the team.

It is very stable.

The scalability definitely meets our businesses requirements. It is highly scalable.

The technical support is good. However, the support portal needs fixing. Accessing a service request on the support portal seems to be a bit difficult, as opposed to just calling the 800 number. I do think it has improved over time.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Go with the virtual appliance versus the hardware.

We integrate the solution with VMware. There have been some cost involved with this.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: the relationship.

We use it for mass and block storage. 

We have not had issues nor performance problems with it.

It has saved us time when provisioning new storage, so we're trying to automate that process.

It's pretty easy to use compared to the older version of the product, which was called VNX. This product is way easier to use.

It performs well. 

They have a Unity REST API that I use to automate some of the storage stuff. I'm just getting started with it, but it seems pretty easy to use.

Dell EMC Unity's competitor, NetApp, has a similar product. However, it has a clustering technology where you can group multiple systems together, then you can move data from one system to another seamlessly. I would like the Unity to do that.

It would be nice to have been able to easily move off our old VNX system to this system. The process is very manual.

The stability is fine.

We haven't really upgraded yet, but I know we can scale to about 500 drives with the system that we have. We are about halfway full. The scalability seems fine.

Technical support has been good and responsive. They know how to fix an issue.

Compared to our old platform, everything is more tightly integrated. I don't have to go to different sections to do something. A lot of it is wizard-driven, so it's an easy to use system.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy.

Deployment was pretty easy. We had a guy come in who did all the work.

Licensing is fine. We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity.

It's a good product.

We use the product with VMware, and also use it with Syft for home directory and departmental shares.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support.
• How long the company has existed.
• Is it an established company and product?
• Performance.

We use it for SAN and NAS, pretty much all of our VMware and ERP systems; everything for storage. It' working out very well. We just moved into it

They've integrated NAS and SAN pretty well. It made replication very simple. Because one of our systems has a lot of LANs, for it to replicate we have Consistency Groups in there. That's something that is really helpful, making sure that everything is working, not just for replication but for backups as well. Pretty much everything we need is there.

We're probably going to be looking into vSAN just to minimize the footprint. We've already minimized the footprint going from VNX to the Unity, but as we're virtualizing more and more, once we're completely virtualized, we'd probably be looking into vSAN through either VxRail or VxRack, and go that way. The smaller the footprint at the data center, the less cost there is.

So far, we've had no issues. We've been running the Unity for about half a year now; no issues with stability at all.

We've only had it for a short time so we haven't had to scale up. We got it scaled to our needs with a little bit of growth put on there.

The team that we got to help us implement it were spot on. They really did do a great job. There were a few cases where we had to pull in some more experienced guys for the networking aspect of it, for the NAS, as there were some issues. But everything else was spot on.

The initial setup was fairly simple because they were able to take all of our information from the VNX and size it appropriately, have all the LUNs set up. The only complex part about it was how we were going to do the SAN to SAN replication, which involved getting everybody on all of the equipment on the latest code, to make sure that we could actually go ahead and replicate. That took some extra work to get that done, but in the end, it was all taken care of and we got replication going.

The pricing is reasonable. We're using the Flex on Demand pricing. It's really good for us when we pay for what we use. It made it easy to get it inside since it's an OpEx and instead of CapEx expense.

I can't say enough about the Flex on Demand because it gives you the agility you need. You can get it in there so easily. You don't have to be fighting with the CFO about how much it costs. It's a lot easier.

It's a really good buy.

We're about to replace a VNX with a Unity in our DR facility. We love that it's only taking about half a rack of space versus the rack-and-a-half that we have for the VNX. That's really good. We're going to be doing SAN to SAN replication. We currently have that going on between the Unity and the VNX using RecoverPoint Appliances, but then it's going to be Unity to Unity after we're done.

I'm very happy with the Unity right now.

We use it for post to all our data stores or virtual environment.

We have had no performance issues. 

As far as benefits, Dell EMC Unity XT gives us fast access orders for everybody in accounting, and it's working. It is all-flash and is in extreme hyper-performance mode. 

When there have been critical updates, we will get phone calls from Dell EMC saying, "We need to update this, and because our contract support level is here, we can do this for you." They will bug you to death until you have updated it, which is good because we are overwhelmed.

It's all-flash.

The solution is so easy to manage that I forget it is there.

Their support is now a lot better, so that is good. They are very helpful when we called in and say, "This is the project that we want to do. Which box should we go about buying? They will send us the information and go through it with us."

We have had issues with the capacity and some misunderstandings on how much compression that we should be able to see out-of-the-box. When we were originally sold the box, it was before the merger. The salesman promised us at least a 50 percent compression on the box, so we ordered it with 2TBs of storage. That was a mistake, because now we are locked into smaller drivess. When it comes down to it, we are running out of space. 

We realized that were barley getting a 12 percent compression offset, not the 50 percent, and this came about the time of the merger. All of this was happening and a lot of people in the company did not return emails at the time. I guess it's because they were no longer with the company or they knew they wouldn't be, that's just speculation. However, it took us several months and almost ruined the our reputation during that time period. They did make right on it and sent us several drives to double the storage on our devises for free, so they made it right towards the end, but it took a while.

The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing. 

Three to five years.

The box has been on 24/7/365 with the exception of one day when we had to change out the batteries in our battery backup. We realized our network cord was not working in it. 

When I left to come the conference, I looked, and uptime on the battery said "527 days".

You only have so many days in the storage. When you buy storage, buy more than you think you'll need, because it will come back and bite you. Because now, if we expand anymore, we will have to buy a box to piggyback on this storage. Hindsight is 20/20, but all-flash is expensive.

Technical support is much better now. They are  responsive, and it is easy to get to the right person. They will blow up your inbox and voicemail if you have a critical update that needs to be applied to either the drives or the box itself, which is great.

Previously, all our servers were running one instance of Windows, and running as a particular application. Email servers were on a server unto themselves. We had a mess. We had so much hardware. 

Because of Dell EMC Unity, I was able to turn off the server that I had been managing for ten years for email. This makes the server room a little quieter now!

We bought the box of all the licensing that we needed and not run into anything where we would need any additional licenses from Dell EMC Unity.

VMware is a different story, but as far as Unity goes, it's not been an issue.

Currently, we buy directly from Dell EMC. We've tried going through resellers before, but we've found that if we go directly through Dell EMC, we get a good a price from being with the government. So, we are lucky there. We have that working relationship with the folks at Dell EMC, and sometimes I even get to run into the rep or specialist at events, which is great. I don't get that with a reseller.

We also looked at iXsystems. We just purchased one of their boxes for storage. I've known iXsystems for a number of years, and they gave us a great price on an absolutely insane amount of storage because all we needed was a box set in a bunker for local backups. The Unity was just outrageously expensive for our needs, so we went with iXsystems. I've managed an iX box in the past. Those guys will bend over backwards to help you as well. So, that's why I chose to go with them.

Spec it out with bigger drives than you think you will need, because when you do expand, you're going to wish you had done that. If you buy bigger drives than what you currently have in a RAID, now you have to have a separate data storage. You can't have one continuous data store. For some people, that might be okay, but we really didn't want that but we were forced into having that.

We do integrate with vSphere. We tried Hyper-V and immediately regretted that decision and went back to vSphere. Right now, that is the only utilization and there are costs involved with the VMware integraton.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• The willingness to make it right when something goes wrong.

All of our servers are Dell EMC servers. We have it integrated with SharePoint and all of our applications.

It's been a great infrastructure to build upon.

For me, the best thing is the reliability. Even some of ours that are somewhat old or out of warranty have a very solid, excellent reliability.

I love the systems management of the servers. It's easy to set up, easy to monitor.

Excellent stability. A lot of ours are older, even past what would be considered end-of-life, but they still have a very low failure rate.

Scalability is good. We use some Dell EMC blade servers, so it's easy to add another blade server without a lot of cabling or setup.

Good tech support. We can usually get a parts dispatch without too much fuss.

The initial setup was easy.

The pricing is right in line with competitors.

I always recommend Dell EMC servers in general, as far as their reliability goes and the management software built in.

I rate it at nine out of ten. Overall, we're very happy with the product. It's not perfect, there are little bits of improvement that could be made to things that we use such as Dell EMC OpenManage Essentials, minor things. It's good, just not perfect.

We use it for virtualization. We have integrated it with Exchange and VMware vSphere.

This is actually part of a delivered solution. We have a VCV block, into which the Unity is embedded. The Unity is one of three components. We've got compute and networking in there. The overall product, with Unity being a component, is fine. And individual Vblocks are fine, but the stretched vCenter that we have was complex. Their product is called VPLEX and it was expensive.

It performs as expected.

• Stability
• Interoperability with the other components of the system

I would like to see better automation of upgrades, more seemless upgrades.

It's very stable.

It's fairly scalable. We went through a scale-up and it performed as expected.

The initial setup was moderately complex.

Hitachi.

If it's a value for your company then I'd recommend it. For us, it was expensive, but it was of value to us.

However, I wouldn't go through that again. We are targeting hyperconverged now, as opposed to converged. It was a bit overwhelming. From the VCE perspective, the individual Vblocks were very well executed, but they didn't seem to know the VPLEX product very well, and that was nail-biting.

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.

Our primary use case is virtualization.

It's a great product if you want something that just works, and works fairly well. It's a product that's tested, tried, and true, where a multitude of customers have depended on the product for the overall requirements of their companies' data. Typically, a company's data is the lifeline of the company. So, if you want something that's tried, tested, and true, that is relatively feature-rich, and that just works, go for it, right. It's a fantastic product.

There are a lot of things that can be done with it. It's got Cloud IQ, but I think it's not as mature as it could be, they could make it more effective. They could make it more comparable to some of the other products out there that have cloud analytics. The amount of insight that the Unity product is able to give, at this point, is okay, but not class-leading. Some of the other data-reduction technologies, like deduplication, are not to the level of other competitors and what their products provide.

I'm nitpicking here and there. Overall, it's a solid product.

It's a stable product. You look at something like Unity, which is based on several generations of product, it's built on products such as the Clariions and the VNX, etc., so it's pretty stable. It's a tried and true product.

If you build it out correctly and it's intended for the workloads that you anticipate, then it's absolutely scalable. If you start to do more with it, and it wasn't built for that particular use case, then it's not as scalable. At the same, with Unity now, you've got the ability to do data-in-place upgrades. From that aspect, it can be relatively more scalable.

I have not used the technical support myself because I'm the architect building out the solution.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. Most arrays these days, they've made them pretty easy to set up. There's typically a management setup, and so on, that you have to follow through. But it's not overly difficult.

It's going to be hard for Dell EMC to really rebuild Unity because Unity, in my opinion, is still a more traditional array. Although they've improved the code, there's only so much they can do, because it's based on technology that's over ten years old. So, for them to make it more next-generation would be difficult. You're getting a tried and true product and you're slapping feature sets on top of it, which is good, but it's not going to be a true next-generation product. And that's okay, it's intended for a certain use case and it works well.

It's better than an average product but it's not a "godsend" product.

We have Dell EMC Unity XT in one of our branch office data centers, and we use it for a small number of users. It's a first step into the flash storage system for us. It has worked very well for us. We're very happy with how it works.

We're a VMware house, so we've integrated it into ESX and we use it as our target environment for vRA. It's worked really well.

We've had it just about over two years now, and it's performing very well. It has fulfilled all our needs. We've had none of the I/O issues that we had seen on our previous SAN. It's worked really well.

In terms of service and deployment, it was done easily. It was a big SAN beforehand, so being flash, it was configured quickly. The footprint that it left in the data center was small, so it has definitely consolidated everything that we've put in there. Across-the-board, our first step into flash went really well.

Ease of use would really be the best feature. We were easily able to get the correct performance details from it. And the configuration was great, it was relatively easy as well; that was brilliant.

In terms of managing it, the performance metrics that it gives, generic stuff, it does everything that we need it to do. We didn't have to create any custom reporting. It all went well.

It has ticked all the boxes for us so far. A fourth year of maintenance at a good price would be good.

One to three years.

From the beginning, we've had no issues. Since it's been turned on, it's worked flawlessly.

We probably overcompensated with the numbers that we put into it in the beginning, so we've not had to upscale anything yet. We're still using it two-and-a-half years later, which is proof that it works.

We have the Call Home feature, which is a kind of preemptive alert for us. So Dell EMC has been telling us when there have been issues. There really haven't been any big ones; minor things, maybe firmware needed to be upgraded. But other than that, it's been fine.

We were using something different. We were coming from the typical fiber background. We needed to get something new, so we looked at a few different options at the time. We went with Dell EMC Unity because we were seeing a higher I/O through the data center, and we thought flash would be the one for us. That's why we went with the Unity box. Also, we went from a 20U footprint down to an 8U footprint. At the time, it was a massive consolidation, space-wise. It did everything else to fill all the proper metrics that we were looking at.

The other criterion we had for vendor selection was ease of use, that was a big thing for us. We've used Dell EMC everywhere else, so we thought it would be a good model to fit in with everything that we have. Going that way was the right step for us.

From the beginning, I worked with Dell EMC on getting it set up the way we wanted it, carved out the way we needed it. It was easy. They got it done in a few hours and it's worked really well since.

The ROI comes down to the level of effort that we've had to put in to make it work, which has been relatively small. That's a massive return on investment for any team.

NetApp was one that we had, they were in contention. We had an IBM solution that they were going to put in place. EqualLogic was also on the shortlist. But we thought Dell EMC Unity would be a good choice for us.

If you're looking at a flash-based system, one that you want to work and not to have to play around with it - to be sure it's working all the time - Unity is definitely a step in the right direction for any company, going forward.

In terms of the purchasing process, we came from the EMC side. It was our first branch into flash after using EMC for so long. It's worked flawlessly, so we have no issues there.

I rate this solution at eight out of ten. Nothing's perfect. It's very hard to make something perfect. Being an eight, it's a really good model for any company to choose. It's a realistic metric to put against something, rather than saying it's perfect.

The speed and performance that we get through the SSD hard drives. That's a big factor for us.

We have a date warehouse server. Prior to being on Unity, we could get about one or two data warehouse refreshes a day. After standing that up in VMware and using Dell EMC Unity, we are able to get four data warehouse refreshes, which gives our finance and accounting group more information to react to throughout the day for inventory and purchasing.

I'm able to manage it very simply. The interface is a lot easier than the couple of VNX2s that we have. At least to me, Dell EMC Unity has a quicker responsive web GUI for management.

The quick integration with VMware. The ability to stand up a data store in one place, where you don't have to go and rescan for the data store through the vCenter Client, as well as SMB shares. This ended up being a big selling point for us.

I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage.

Stability has been 100%. We have had zero failures.

We have added one additional shelf to one of the two Unities. As far as I can tell, it went really well. It was not something I was involved with, but we may have had Dell EMC assist us with that.

In the SQL Server instances in our data warehouse, we immediately saw a great return on investment.

We purchased our Unity in September 2017. It was a simple process. We budgeted for it in the prior year. Then, we had the funds to take care of what we wanted to purchase.

I did bring up other vendors that I have worked with: NetApp and HPE SAN. Comparing them to my previous work and working with Unity now, I find Unity a lot easier to work with. For example, the NetApp seems to be more complex in just the ease of setting it up.

Do a little research into how you will create your storage groups. Ensure they have all lined out prior to going in and making one single storage group take up all the hard drives which we've seen some individuals do before and have to break it back down and start over. Definitely manage out what you want to place on the SSDs or on that Unity for your quickest response time. We've made sure that all of our high availability productions devices are on the Unity.

We have Hyper-V and VMware running on the Unity. We have moved Exchange off into Exchange Online onto the cloud. We did most of the integrations in-house. The big thing that we have done on it is running SQL Server. We have quite a few different SQL Server instances running on the SSDs.

Our primary use case for Unity - we use the All-Flash, we don't use the Hybrid array - is as our go-to source for all of our virtualized Oracle Databases. We've moved about 95 percent of our Oracle Databases to Unity. There are a few extremely high-profile databases that nobody wants to move. Nobody wants to touch them. But pretty much everything else is on Unity. We're starting to branch out and put just regular, general purpose load on there. And we also recently put all of our Exchange environment on there as well.

We started going down the path of doing the vCenter integration, but we just ran out of time for testing it. That's on our bucket-list of things to do, because that'll make it even easier. But we haven't hit that yet.

As far as how Dell EMC Unity XT has performed, I don't think I've ever seen latencies above 10 milliseconds, unless it was something that wasn't the array that was messing up. The thing is rock-solid.

We've recently gone from a five-man team down to two, not because of the Unity solely, but we haven't necessarily had to replace everyone. We've been able to consolidate a lot of VNXs into just a couple of Unity's. We have less to manage and we need fewer people.

As far as the simplicity goes, adding hosts is easier. Everything is just about automatic. We're used to those old VNX1s, which are running Windows CE. Using the CLI on those is a little clunky, while logging into the CLI on the Unisphere is easy. It just makes sense, especially if you're used to Unix, because it's a Unix-based system. It's all-around easier to use.

• Being that we are heavily invested in VNX1s, the UI itself is fantastic, and the ease of administration is far better than Unisphere or Navisphere ever were. It's very easy to manage.
• The fact that it has built-in APIs means our automation people can help us automate a lot of tasks, and that has been helpful.
• And, of course, it's really fast. Obviously, that doesn't hurt anything at all.

One to three years.

At this point, we've only had one major issue, and we've had two of the systems in-house for a year and a half. The issue was fixed within a matter of hours by support. In that same year and a half, we've had a lot of other pieces of equipment that have had a lot of other issues, so the stability is great, at least for us.

We just recently started using the Dynamic Pools, so while it's scalable, we actually find it valuable that we can just pop in one or two drives when we need to, instead of having to add a whole RAID set. That has actually been very handy for us. A lot of the time, as a government organization, we don't always get all the money we ask for. Sometimes, the money that gets slated to us gets pulled out, last-minute, so we're trying to buy drives and hoard them. We always put drives in last-minute, and that's been extremely helpful.

I know that's not exactly the question in terms of scalability, but that has been more helpful to us than being able to add a zillion disks at a time. Being able to add onesies, twosies to a pool is really helpful.

The initial setup was very easy. I don't really remember any "gotchas."

We're a Dell EMC shop, we don't have any other storage vendors, so we don't really do a good job of looking into the storage vendors either. We have a good relationship with Dell EMC, we have a good sales guy and a good technical account manager. We trust them. When we told them that we had a lot of people asking for all-flash, that was the choice. We don't use enterprise-level stuff, we don't use VMAX. So we went with Unity.

When selecting a vendor, the relationship with the technical support is pretty important. We've been a Dell EMC shop for a long time, so there are some guys in the tech support whose emails I have. I don't necessarily have to open up an SR. If I just have a question I can just email them and I'll usually get a response in a day or two. That keeps me from having to do some of that paperwork. The other thing, when selecting a vendor, if I were the number-crunching guy: Obviously a vendor who's willing to work on price is always going to be helpful.

A piece of advice when it comes to research is to try to find another company that's using what you're considering. After you talk to the salespeople, after you get the dog and pony show, have them connect you with somebody who's using it, who they trust - maybe even someone you know or have some contact with - and get their thoughts about it. You usually get a lot more truth from those kinds of conversations.

Our primary usage is for our users on our civilian side. We deal with both military and civilian, but it's mainly for our civilian users. We recently started using it, six months ago. Our customers like it a lot. It's an improvement from what we were using. We use it for our Outlook and Exchange but we haven't implemented with our VMware yet.

It gives us an easier way to manage our users. We have a lot of users, so it's better on that side of things. Compared to the HPE product we were using beforehand, it's definitely simpler. The interface is smoother too compared to the HPE product. The team that we have now prefers it, so far.

The interface is pretty easy and it didn't take too long to get trained on it.

We haven't had any issues with it, any outages. We have a lot of users and it's been able to handle our high usage rate.

We haven't increased in size much. Given the user rate we're at now, we think it will probably scale pretty easily without having any issues.

We have not had to use technical support.

We were using HPE before. It wasn't that we needed to switch, but we switched because we were having a few issues. They wanted to try something new. When we did so, the users and the IT team and the customers preferred it. They thought it was a lot smoother.

Because we work with the DoD, they have a list of devices that are approved. That's the list they go off of.

It was more our Tier 3 team that did the setup, but they didn't have any issues with it. Most of them have a lot of experience with a lot of equipment so, it was pretty smooth.

I definitely see value in it. We will probably implement it in other locations that we have as well, since we currently only use it at our main location. It has definitely been useful equipment.

If a friend or colleague was using the equipment that we were using beforehand, we'd definitely tell them to transition over because it is a lot easier to use.

I'd rate it about a nine out of ten. It's smooth, has been an easy transition, the interface is a lot easier than the one we were working with. The setup was easy and we haven't had any problems with it. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's really good equipment.

We use it for ESXi data stores and performance seems to be okay so far. We've only had it a couple months. We have it integrated with VMware.

The benefits are the stability and that we're able to contact Dell EMC support for a quick turnaround. We have a higher level of support. If we have issues, they generally get fixed quickly.

Our hope is that they stay up, online, and that we will be able to update them while the data stores are operational. That is why we picked them.

Once it is set up, it is definitely easy to manage.

We've got an ongoing issue with a Unity in which some power supply fans spin up. We've had a whole bunch of hardware changed as a result but I still have an open SR, which has been a struggle. It doesn't seem to affect performance but it's something that we're hoping the engineers can resolve.

We have also had some issues with an upgrade where we can't manage a device, after the upgrade. So we had to have a ticket in for that.

The stability has been fine so far. We're good during normal operations.

In terms of scalability, the size is fine for the environment we have. We're usually at about half the capacity, so we have quite a bit more we can expand with. It's good.

In most situations, tech support works really well. If there are technical logs that they can diagnose and actually pull something out of, fantastic. If there aren't, if it's an abstract sort of issue, like the fan issues we're having, where they cycle every six minutes, it's taken me about six weeks.

They didn't believe me that the environment was not too hot. So they sent a technician out just to make sure that I could read the thermostat, that it was 68 degrees in our office. Then, they sent someone out to reseed each component, which I had already done. I didn't appreciate that part because I did some of those basics. I did exactly what they had said on the phone. The third time, they actually replaced some components and the fourth time they just sent the components to be replaced. It appeared to work, the fan issue did appear to go away, but it came back a couple of weeks later, after an update. I'm not sure if it's update-related, but it came back.

Because I've done the setup before with the VNXe version, it was straightforward. It's very similar to the VNXe.

Licensing has been quite difficult. It doesn't always auto-license. About half the time, when I provision one, I have to contact Service to get a license, or even go to our account manager to help get it straightened out.

Study the configurations of what you need to use and ensure you understand what you're provisioning. The procurement process can be a little daunting because there are a lot of features and there are a lot of components that you'll get set up with but which you may not need.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for me are global, 24-hour support; being able to get things fixed. After that, price, because we'll probably buy a thousand of them over time.

We use it to high-speed all of our SQL Servers.

It increased the boot speed on our SQL Servers. It made downtimes incredibly small compared to when we had them on normal spinning disk. Back then, it would take two or three minutes to boot up. Now, on all-flash, it's 25 to 30 seconds. So it has improved downtime, if we have to reboot a server, which is something we do a lot.

We used to have Exchange on it but we've put that in the cloud so it's no longer on a solution. When we did have it, it was faster because it wasn't on spinning disks. It helped us with that.

Being all-flash makes everything super-fast.

It's also great to manage. That's the easiest part. We also have another SAN, from Pure, and the Unity is easier to manage than the Pure.

Support and licensing are big things, in the end, that needs improvement.

It's very stable. We have not had any issues with it since we put it in. We've had one drive fail in two years. It was easily replaced, a hot swap and done. It has been incredibly easy and been stable for two years.

We have used technical support and I would rate them a massive zero. I put in a ticket, although my preferred contact method is a call. I never receive a call. I send it to my sales engineer, my sales engineer sends it to their manager, the manager tells the guy to give me a call, and he sends me an email. That's not my preferred contact method and, even when complaining, I still get an email.

Also, when I put in a ticket and say, "Here are our logs," they don't read the logs. It even says to do so in the ticket, but they skim over it. Their support has been pretty bad since they became Dell EMC. EMC used to be good. Dell has been horrible forever. I think it's going down that road.

We were using the VNX and the IBM V7000. We needed to move to a new solution because they were slow. There was a little bit of flash in the VNX, and some in the V7000, but the all-flash was just such an improvement that we decided we needed to go to the Unity.

When looking to work with a vendor, the important criteria we look for are nothing too pushy, and having a good relationship, and a continued relationship. It's not good when they just sell and leave. It's always good to continue that communication, make sure we have everything we need.

The fact that it reduces our downtime gives us incredible cost savings. Our industry is agriculture. We do market trading. Seconds are everything that matters. That minute, or the few minutes, that we save can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars. If that happens in the middle of the day, since we are trading constantly, reducing the amount of time that it takes, when something goes down, to get back up is cost savings.

Licensing is a little bit confusing. Going through everything with them, there are a lot of line items to go over. Every single thing is broken down into a line item, and it starts to get really confusing in terms of what we're actually purchasing when it comes to the product.

We looked at Pure. Unity beat out Pure.

Make sure you have all your ducks in a row when you finish. Make sure they understand the type of support that you want, make sure the licensing is clear, make sure it has all the features you want.

The purchasing process was actually incredibly easy. We had a vendor to go through. She was able to clear everything up. When we were trying to look at it ourselves, it was a little bit convoluted. But once we had her help explain it through, it became easier.

They have a good product. It's great for what it does. The surrounding pieces are where everything gets tricky.

We use it for our NAS systems and our SAN systems. On the NAS side, it's used for our end-users' home directories and Departmental shares. On the block side, we use it for VMware storage and we have it integrated with VMware. There was no additional cost for that integration.

We just started doing a bunch of automation where, if an end-user's home directory or Departmental share gets filled, I can set certain things through a Unity API so that if it reaches 95 or 98 percent full, it will automatically expand. Now, instead of our getting a ticket and having to go in and do it manually, it does that for us.

Our end-users are happy with the product, there are no issues.

The product is pretty easy to use. The GUI is nice, really easy to use, and the performance is good. 

For the upgrade from the old system to the new system, if there was a better way to integrate them so I could easily move the data without working all those nights and weekends, that would be nice.

Also, Dell EMC's competitor has a clustering technology. In the next release, it would be nice if they could build that into the product.

The product has been pretty good.

There was one minor issue where we would get these alerts every six hours, but they were fake alerts. We installed a patch a week ago and it fixed the issue. Other than that, no issues, the product has been stable.

We have a Unity 500, which scales to 500 drives, and we're about half full. But it's like their previous systems where you can add a couple of drives or a couple of shelves. There are no issues on that end.

Technical support has always been pretty good. Customer service includes the guys who come in and replace the drives and install the system, and those guys are good too. No issues.

We had the older generation of the Unity system, it was called EMC VNX. It's similar in some ways, but they've definitely improved the GUI, the user interface, and the performance.

When selecting a vendor, a big thing is support. We really need a company that, when something goes wrong, they're there and they can respond immediately, so we don't have to wait a certain amount of time. We experience a little bit of the waiting part with Dell EMC, but we have a technical account manager, and his job is to escalate. Since we already had that with EMC, it made sense to go with Dell EMC. So support would be number one. Number two would be performance, obviously. It has to work well.

The initial setup was pretty easy. We actually have a Dell EMC service engineer who came on site and helped set it up. I had to help in terms of getting all the infrastructure ready, but he did most of the heavy work.

The upgrading experience from our previous solution to this one is definitely better than it was with the VNX product. The only thing that we wished that it had is a way to migrate the data from the old system to the new system. We had to do a manual process for that. To move the data, we had to work a lot of nights and weekends. That was the hardest part of setting it up.

But other than that, it's better in every way.

I get fewer calls at night. That's my ROI.

NetApp and HPE were on our shortlist. HPE support is not good, so we didn't choose them. NetApp does have some good technology, but the relationship that we had with Dell EMC was the reason that we chose them.

In terms of the purchase process, we work with a rep. We have biweekly meetings. They're always on site. We worked with the Dell EMC sales engineer, making sure we got the right kind of drives, the right kind of performance, etc.

Primary use is mid-range storage. We have two variants, we have the hybrid version and the all-flash version. It's for general use. For high performance, we have different systems.

For the hybrid version, the benefit is that data is stored on relatively cheap storage. Hot data is on faster storage. On the all-flash version, lower energy costs help, if you want to pursue green IT.

In the hybrid version, I would say they are fast. They have fully automated storage tiering. In the all-flash version, higher performance, compression, data replication.

• One-to-many replication.
• Data deduplication.
• Asynchronous Fibre Channel replication. It is asynchronous on iSCSI and I would like to have that on the Fibre Channel.
• Unisphere-wise, I have to log in to each Unity as a unique environment. In VNX, I logged in to the domain and I was logged in to every VNX. So that's missing.
• I miss storage groups. Now, if I have to add a LUN to a cluster, multiple host, I have to know which host is in that cluster. I have to write it down and that makes it hard. In VNX and earlier, I could simply put a LUN on a storage group and every host in the group had the LUN. This lack bothers me a lot because it takes a lot of time and mistakes are made. Sometimes, a Hyper-V host gets a VMware LUN and vice-versa. Not good.

Stability could be better. I've had a few storage processor reboots; not as often as with VNX. And Clariion was a disaster. So, it has improved.

The scalability is less than with VNX. In the VNX, I could replicate out to more than one storage system. On Unity, it's one on one. If I could migrate one to many, that would be helpful, but that is missing now.

I'm certified myself. We have certified colleagues. But we use technical support. The problem is that some of the time we are more knowledgeable than them.

VNX1/2

Tech-refresh

The setup is straightforward.

in-house

no clue

no clue. I'm technical, I don't do prices

No. We only use EMC

The hardware is fine, a nine or a 10 out of 10. Manageability is a seven or eight out of 10, because of the storage group and the domain absence. Overall, if I put the two together, the solution is a nine out of 10.

My advice would be to stick with VNX. If the developers come up with a solution for single sign-on for multiple Unity's, and if they bring back the storage groups, I'm fine with it. It's a good solution.

It's our primary storage array. We have a public cloud hosted internally, and it's our primary storage array for our customer virtual machines. It has performed very well. There have been no problems with it. We've had it for about nine months and it has performed well.

Obviously, our customers rely on us for uptime. We've had no problems with it so far. Migration to it went very smoothly, so in terms of value to us, it's been very good at keeping our workload and our uptime going.

Also, it has definitely provided much faster performance.

Storage Snapshots have been really nice. They allow us to do backups without impacting our production workload that much.

The scalability, the ability to add disks dynamically and adjust our workload as needed, has also been really helpful. That definitely makes my job easier.

The interface for managing Unity is very easy. The integrations between VMware Hypervisor and Dell EMC are top-notch, so it's been really easy to use and manage. We already had solutions in place, so it was more just a matter of buying the hardware and migrating workloads over to it. There was no cost other than the purchase of the hardware and software licenses.

We had a couple issues, but they were very minor, related to storage Snapshots and our backup product, which is Veeam. That turned out to be a Veeam issue.

My only complaint would be some of the CLI Help files could be a little more detailed, but that's very minor complaint. We were trying to run some commands just to see how the storage snaps were interacting with the storage array, and it was a little difficult to look up exactly what commands should be run. The Help files detailing what exactly the commands did wasn't as detailed as we would have wanted them to be. They were very limited in scope. They could have been more detailed.

More integration with VMware would always be helpful, plugins that go directly into the vSphere management. A single pane of glass is always beneficial.

It's been very good at scaling when we've needed it to. It's been a good solution so far.

We have used technical support occasionally. There really have been no issues, we haven't had it that long. But just for implementation and licensing, we did contact support a couple of times. There were no issues with it. They were helpful.

We were using a VNX array, which was fine for the time when we had it, but we've expanded. The business is growing and we decided to invest in something a little more heavy-duty to handle the kind of IOPS that we're dealing with now. We are a Dell EMC partner. Obviously, that is who we wanted to go with.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is their relationship with us. In addition, easy use of the product and reliability are important. We rely on uptime, so we look for redundancy and reliability.

I didn't install the hardware, but I definitely assisted in setting it up: migrating workloads to it, setting up data stores, etc. The process was pretty straightforward. It was stuff I've done a hundred times before, so it was what I expected. It was not more complicated than what I would have hoped for.

We don't have many numbers in terms of ROI because we've only had it about nine months, but we definitely see the performance value.

We looked at a couple. We looked at Rubrik a little bit and we looked at some HPE arrays, but we decided to go with Dell EMC to keep up our partnership with them.

Ownership simplicity is there. Licensing was straightforward. We've always had good support from Dell EMC, we've never had a problem with them. Their solution engineers are always very helpful. So overall, no problems with ownership.

I give the Unity a nine out of ten. The Help files and a little more integration would be nice.

We have it set up for storage for VDI. It is as advertised: Very easy to set up, very easy to manage, and the performance is great. We have integrated the solution with Horizon VDI and there was no additional cost to do so.

I don't have to spend nearly as much time getting in to manage the device on a daily basis because it functions very smoothly. We don't have any issues with it. Usually, on a daily basis, we don't mess with it. It's been hands-off since got it set up and configured. It's been great.

The ease of setup and management have been the best features.

The only thing that could improve it would be a price reduction.

It's very stable. We hardly get into the device itself to manage it on a daily basis. It's been great.

We have not had to scale it yet but, from what I have read and understand, scalability will be very easy. Adding extra bricks or nodes to it is going to be easy.

We haven't had to use technical support.

We had a previous storage device that was coming to end-of-life and we wanted to replace it. We had to do it in a very short time, last year. I liked the performance and the features that the Unity had. The cost was also a factor in our choice.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that they need to be an industry leader, they need to be easy to work with, and they need to be fast. A lot of times in IT, we move fast. I need quotes fast, I need demos fast. That's one of the things that Dell EMC has always done for us. Those are a few things that we look for.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We had a Dell EMC technician on site to help us. He was very helpful, explained what he was doing, let us get hands-on when we wanted to be and could. It was a very smooth process.

Our shortlist also included Nimble. 

So far, it has done everything that they say, in demos, it will do. I cannot stress enough how simple and easy it is to set up and use and manage. That's it.

Regarding simplicity of ownership, everything that we've experienced so far has been very easy to deal with. We already have a Dell EMC rep who handles all of our licensing and notifications, keeping us up to date on that. Management of it and service have been very positive, nice and simple.

It was also very easy to order. We have had a relationship with our Dell EMC reps in Kansas City for the last 12 years, so getting in touch with them, having them come out and demo the product as best they could, and then getting us the pricing, getting it delivered - everything was very simple.

I rate the Unity at eight out of ten. I don't think it's possible for it to be ten. They'd have to have someone from Dell EMC show up and do my job for me to get it to a ten.

We did a one-month exercise with EMC. We are trying to replace several systems, like NAS and some file shares, put them into one consolidated system. We do have VDI. We're going to re-use it for VDI, so this is the perspective we're trying to evolve toward.

We're replacing legacy hardware and hardware that is going out of support, and we are consolidating two or three systems into one. We also do have some special security requirements that Unity can meet.

The NAS capability is mainly what we're looking for from this product, and being able to recover fast in DR.

I don't think at this stage we have a specific concern. They have answered most of our concerns in terms of scalability and being future-proof.

We actually haven't tested it yet.

I believe it is scalable.

Dell EMC is actually one of the strategic vendors we work with, so they have quite a big presence at our bank. We meet with them at least once every two weeks.

I believe the setup is going to be straightforward because they have this tool that migrates the data seamlessly, and you don't have any system downtime. I believe it is called Datadobi. It takes out all your data from one system to another and makes it seamless.

Most of the infrastructure we have is from Dell EMC, so we're locked in with Dell but that's fine. If you're happy with the specific product and vendor, why change?

We use it for enterprise SAN. We have multiple units. We just started getting them in and the performance has been good. It back-ends our enterprise Oracle, which is for our financials. We have some Mission-Support applications that it supports as well. We have both structured and unstructured data.

The most valuable feature is the ease of integrating it into our current environment. It works within our enterprise management application. The NAS is also extremely easy to set up.

On the data domains - for the Unity product, but specifically for data domains - I would like a much easier interface for managing, for actually going in and having one place where I could get all of the different parts of the overall unit. And I would also like to be able to identify individual disks a lot more easily.

In terms of stability, so far everything has been fine.

The scalability has been pretty easy too, as opposed to some other vendors that we've had in the past.

We have only used tech support to replace drives that have gone bad. But our experience has not been so good. The biggest problem has been having the right equipment in the right category that our support people can have access to. We have multiple accounts, and unfortunately, equipment is across them. So we'll call it in and they'll say, "Well, that's not under your account," so they can't actually go in online and put an SR against it. We're working on fixing that, but that's been extremely frustrating. Once we get past it, and if they understand that, yes, we do own it, and where the site is, etc., getting the part is easy.

We are replacing our VNX2s with the Unity storage. The VNXs were end-of-life and it was our normal tech refresh. We also had new requirements come in for larger storage so we bought the Unity.

The initial set up was more difficult than the original VNX2s. My Storage Admin said that it was just different.

Three years is probably the best that we get for the return on our investment. It takes three years to actually get it back.

Regarding the licensing, that was easy. As far as recurring costs go, all that is understood, what we need to keep in place. If we grow and scale, we also understand a license comes with that, too. In terms of integrating it with our existing apps, there was no additional cost, nothing we didn't expect.

Primarily we're Dell EMC. We do have NetApp and they're pretty big, they're petabyte systems and they're primarily for a business-level project, not for enterprise storage. After using them, we definitely wanted to stick with Dell EMC.

It's a good product and you should definitely evaluate it. We're concerned about standardization, so even if a product has something that's better - one item, one capability that's better - we probably wouldn't go with it and would rather standardize across, for support and everything else. That's important to us.

For the purchasing process, we'll go to the vendor, we'll give them our requirements, and we'll work out the final design. They'll give us a quote and then we'll get two more quotes from two other vendors. We're required to get three quotes. I then put that in through my finance and then it goes through contracting. Contracting goes out and they get the true quote. And then, once the equipment is purchased, it comes directly to me onsite.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. Improving the interface for managing it would help make it a ten.

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.

We primarily use Dell EMC Unity XT for SAN storage for ESX data stores. It has been performing okay. We have integrated it with VMware. We do have iSCSI LUNs for some Microsoft Windows servers as well, but not many.

It allows junior engineers to administer it a lot, so senior engineers, like myself, don't have to do hands-on stuff. It's less complex.

The most valuable feature is the interface. It is really usable, easy to manage.

Looking at that ease of management, for LUN creation, I like the integration into VirtualCenter. I used to have to add LUNs manually, then scan them in and format them. It does that all for you, all in one, immediate deployment of LUNs. Also, for replication, we use RecoverPoint. It's a little clunky but, overall, the Unity part of that product works in a very simplistic manner. It's easy to manage.

I would like better integration with RecoverPoint. My major issue with the solution, all around, has been RecoverPoint more than Unity. While I like the easy user interface, I would like some more advanced features for troubleshooting built into the product, so that we can do more in-depth problem-solving.

The issue we're having right now is that we can't really see much in the interface. Support can see more, but we can't see what's going on, so we have to rely on support to send us things. I would like something that a power user, an advanced user, a subject matter expert, could actually look at and say, "Okay, this is what's going on here," to make troubleshooting easier, instead of just the happy, bubbly alerts.

One to three years.

Stability is the problem. We've had stability issues with it. We've had problems with the iSCSI interface. We've had it for two years now and for two years we've had problems where a service processor will drop, we'll lose connectivity to LUNs, we'll lose connectivity to the storage, issues like that. No matter how we've tried to chase it down, everybody just points fingers at each other. The only thing that changed in our environment was that the Unity solution was installed. It's the "least common factor."

The scalability is great. If we need to expand, it's very easy to expand.

Aside from the finger-pointing, they're generally pretty easy to work with. But in my opinion, it's hard to get up to higher levels of support. For a complex problem like we've had, it's been very difficult for us to get ahold of the right type of people. We almost need engineers or someone at a higher level. When you call in, you get the base-level people. What I always say whenever it comes to tech support is, if I'm calling you, it's not a problem that's easily solved. Because if it was easy, I would have fixed it myself. So getting to those higher levels of support has been very problematic for us. They just want to say, "It's not our issue," instead of someone actually tackling the problem.

We had a VNX before and the one that we were using was starting to be phased out. We needed to keep on support and we need to stay with a solution, for our clients, that is newer and cutting edge. We were aimed towards Unity.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is interoperability. It has to be able to integrate really well.

Deployment was complicated when we did it initially and we still have problems with it. We had a VAR come out to do the initial install.

As far as cost is concerned, it does great deduplication. From a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk. It's easy to manage, which saves us time. Overall, that time is money; it saves us money. It has a pretty good ROI.

As far as simplicity of ownership goes, I don't think there is anything aside from the maintenance licensing.

We were aiming more towards Dell EMC because that's what we had previously.

Test it really well first, and get somebody who knows what they're doing to set it up. The VAR that we were referred to was terrible. That was the root of a lot of our problems.

If we didn't have the problems that we had with it - all the problems that I highlighted above - it would be definitely a ten out of ten. But given those problems, and the fact that one of them has been going on for two years and we still don't have a solution, and the Unity is the only factor that changed in the environment...

For most of our general-purpose cluster, we are using a Unity as Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage. Earlier, we were using a VNX box. Compared to VNX we are getting better performance.

We are looking for a lot of automation from the Unity. For example, if I want to create one LUN from the Unity box, I have to do multiple clicks. I create zoning and there are a lot of steps involved. But, looking forward, we can reduce the steps, automate things so they are done more easily, deploying LUNs.

The deployment is very easy. Via a click, we can deploy a data store or LUN to the ESX host. We can also deploy VVOLs to the ESX server.

I'm looking for more automation, not only for VVOLs, but for NFS and RDM disk.

The stability is good. I don't see any issues with the Unity boxes.

Scaling is easy. If there is future growth I am able to call Dell EMC to provide additional capacity.

When it arrived at our data center I was there, but the installation and configuration services were done by EMC. I sat with them, watched what they were doing. It was pretty simple.

I would definitely recommend Unity because, compared to VNX and other storage solutions, it is the easiest way to deploy for VMware and physical operating system services.

Regarding ownership, it is very easy. It's a single point of contact. We have the type of support from Dell EMC where, in case of any failure, we get an immediate response from them. For the purchasing process, we just validate the bill of materials and then we reach out to the Dell EMC salesperson to get it delivered to our data center.

We are working on the vSphere integration. Once that integration is done we will easily be able to do everything on the vSphere console.

The primary use case is mid-tier processing for our hospitals. We have a lot of VM infrastructure on the Unity, but not our most mission-critical. The performance has been great.

The biggest benefit is where it fits in the cost profile. It's for VMs that, again, aren't mission-critical but do need some performance. It fits really well there for that. We get exactly what we want from it, what we expected.

The replication is big for us.

We use file services on Unity and it has a really nice file services interface.

It's also easy to manage. It's really easy in terms of provisioning, replication. There are no real tricks to it. It's just easy.

The biggest one for us, and the reason we don't use it more, is that we can't throttle the replication speed. If it's on, it's on. So we have to be a little more WAN-sensitive, in some applications, which means we can't put it everywhere. That's the biggest issue for us, by far.

The stability has been very good. We've had it for a couple years, really like it.

Scalability is also really easy. There are lots of options.

Our experience with technical support depends. That mid-range is probably not the strong suit in terms of Dell EMC support. They don't have the depth of technical experience in that area like they do with some of the other products. But we haven't had any serious issues with it.

This was a VNX replacement. We had an older VNX that was off the depreciation tables and maintenance costs were a little higher, as the equipment aged. We just replaced it, pretty much one-for-one.

When selecting a vendor, a big factor for us is the quality of support.

The initial setup was really straightforward. I've been doing this for a long time so there were no real surprises in terms of the Unity.

The ROI is right where we need it to be. It's a reasonably priced array. It performs a function that we absolutely need, and it definitely fits where we want it to be. We wouldn't use it for everything but, where we use it appropriately, it makes a lot of sense.

This one came down to either Dell EMC or Pure. We had a NetApp as well, but we weren't considering that. Pure doesn't really have the depth of product offering, so this was an easy choice for us.

I would definitely recommend it and have recommended it. We're pretty large, but I think for most companies it probably is the array that's going to work the best, especially for a VM workload. If you don't want to invest in a VMAX, this makes a lot of sense.

It fits that price profile really well. It's an entry-level, all-flash array for us. So stuff that we don't want to go on VMAX or XtremIO, we can put right on the Unity and feel pretty comfortable that it's going to do what we need it to do, as far as performance goes. Unity falls right in, with it being the successor to the VNX line. It works great, has a very simple interface that we're comfortable with, so it's a good product for us.

In terms of the purchasing process, we have a pretty good sized environment, so we work with our dedicated team. They knew that this was going to perform the way we wanted. We had a spot where we needed some VNX replacement and this was the logical choice. It was very easy.

My rating of eight out of ten would get to a ten if it had throttled replication.

The primary use case is for our reporting environment, business intelligence and analytics. We run our Oracle and SAS-based applications on it right now. The performance is sufficient and we don't have any complaints about it. 

It runs our business analytics environment, so it improves reporting performance, how they pull data.

For our environment just having a solid, running box is really sufficient.

The administration of it is fine. For the most part, it is easy to manage. There is not a lot that you really need to change, there is not that much you really need to do. 

The Active Directory integration isn't very good, it is kind of limiting. It's okay.

When you get into more advanced storage administration, it's really hard to find that stuff, but those situations are few and far between, so it's not that relevant.

Also, I called about an issue where I couldn't get VVOLs registered. It turns out it is a bug in the code and that there is no information about when it will be fixed. It's just not going to work. I was a little miffed about that, especially getting more into VVOLs with Pure Storage, but it is what it is.

I would like to see better support for VVOLs and a less hokey AD-integrated login. Those are probably the two things that bug me the most.

I haven't had any issues with stability.

We did an upgrade not that long ago and that was a little rough. They uploaded the firmware and it seems it was corrupted. When they went to go live with the upgrade process they had to re-download it, which took a while. I didn't have any issues personally but I saw some of the trials that the support and then the engineering teams went through. It made me a little anxious, watching that process.

The scalability is fine. There's not much for me to really say about scalability. Adding disk is really the scalability factor, for right now. We only have two shelves of storage disks so I don't have any concerns about or needs for scalability.

Support was responsive.

I am not sure we've gotten to the point of getting a return because we've spent three years investing in trying to build out our SAS platform. I'm not sure we're there yet.

Vet out your use case sufficiently, make sure you understand what you are trying to achieve and how you are trying to achieve it. Do your best to leverage the gambit of functionality, as opposed to focusing on one area.

I rate it at eight out of ten. The best would be no issues, no concerns. I can't imagine I'd give anyone a ten, to be honest. To achieve that is pretty hard.

I wouldn't not recommend Unity.

Our Unity arrays are our primary storage arrays for both of our data centers. We run all our VMs on there, they're all-flash. They've been running great. We've had no problems with them. Fantastic.

The fact it's all-flash is why we chose it. The speed increase, therefore, that we've experienced from it has been great.

Obviously its speed is the main reason why we got it but we've really loved being able to use the interface. We've been able to create LUNs easily. We're able to get in there and create what we need, do everything we need to do, configure it the way it needed to be configured.

In terms of simplicity of ownership, it was almost plug-and-go. We did have some help getting it set up but, as for licensing and being able to get support through Dell EMC's site, it has been really easy. The interface makes it really easy to manage.

There could always be improvements to the UI. For what we've been using it for it's been great, but there are always little tweaks that could happen there.

It's been very stable. We haven't had any issues. I think we had a drive go out and it was quick to alert us and they made sure that we got it replaced without any failures. Everything has been great.

We haven't had to do any expansion on it yet, but I've heard that it's very easy and that, if we ever need it, it shouldn't be a problem.

We've used the technical support. They've been great. They have a good system to alert you when there's an issue. They've been quick to get us the drives that we need.

The initial setup wasn't too bad. They delivered it. We got the software installed, the OS installed, and got it all configured. It was just a matter of setting up the LUNs. We had a little bit of help with that but it was not difficult.

My advice is, obviously, to go with something tailored to your needs. For what this has been, a full flash array and ease of setup, from what I've had experience with, I would probably recommend the Unity array.

We plan to eventually use the VMware integration. There is a little bit that we're using right now but it's not the whole vSAN setup. I don't believe there will be a cost involved with that. It's just a matter of taking the time and getting it set up. Right now, we just have it set up as a simple SAN array.

Nothing is ever perfect. It would have to be perfect to be a ten out of ten, but this is probably as close as we've been to perfect, so that's good.

We're using it for block storage in a lab, supporting Fortune 500 customers, testing out solutions. We have a number of other competitive solutions in the lab and we try out upgrades for customers, we test out all the different features and functions.

Performance of the system is fine, I really don't have any issues with the actual raw IO of the system, but the competitors are pushing a lot of all-flash solutions in front of us.

We're not doing any integrated Snapshotting of the applications. Some of our team is working on being able to Snapshot Oracle RAC clusters but, for the most part, we're focusing on doing mostly backup solutions, data protection software.

It is completely reliable. The plugins for it are quite mature. I don't really have any issues with the interactions with vSphere, they all work as intended. There is a level of reliance and a maturity in the product, whereas the other ones are a little more cutting edge and the bugs can come out of the blue.

It still has the same implementation headaches of the VNX that came before it. It's still the same Unisphere, it's all the same tools from the VNX, nothing has really changed, from my perspective. It's still all the same stuff we're used to seeing. The management of it just isn't very strong, whereas a lot of the tasks I do day-to-day on some of the newer competitors, like Pure and Kaminario - we're talking three to five seconds to get something done rather than 15-20 minutes. It's a big time saver on the other systems. With the Unity, once it's installed, raw performance works fine.

In future releases, I would like to see automatic upgrades from one to the next, when this system is coming out and the next one is coming in; more akin to what Pure Storage is doing. That would be really helpful.

I don't know that I can really address the issue of scalability with the units we have. We have mostly a test box, a small one. We haven't had to add disk shelves or do any scaling of the system.

Unity is a lot like "no one gets fired for buying IBM." I think you will get what you pay for, but a lot of competitors have better efficiencies, better programs, easier installations. I'd be looking elsewhere. I don't feel the product is the leader in the market anymore.

I rate the Unity at eight out of ten. It gets the job done, it does it well, I can rely on it. It's just not cutting-edge in any way right now. To get to a ten, as I said, the upgrade process needs improvement. I should be able to swap it out, with zero downtime, with another array, down the road. I don't think Dell EMC has anything in the roadmap for this product line. I just don't want to have to deal with that anymore, and all of our customers feel pretty much the same.

We're using Dell EMC Unity as our primary storage for our production and for our DR site. We've had no performance issues with it, whatsoever.

We're using it for our data storage, for our virtual machines. It's the only array that we have, so we're not doing tiering at all. Everything is on the unit. We're using it for the data storage that we replicate to our DR site, for the ones that just stay local. We're using it for allocating raw disk-mapping, for mapping storage from the SAN directly to virtual machines for super-clusters and the like. We're using it for everything

The fact that it's all-flash has really helped our overall performance.

It's easy to manage. We access it and manage it through Unisphere and have had no issues. We're able to provision storage, create consistency groups, create RDMs for our virtual machines. Creating it through Unisphere, it automatically adds the data store on the VMware side and rescans the LUNs. We just have to add and configure the storage in one place and it takes care of everything, which is very handy.

Unity only does compression. It would be nice if there was a deduplication feature as well. At my previous job, we used XtremIO and that had deduplication and not compression, and I think we got more out of it because the more OSs you have that are the same, the fewer copies it needs to keep of all that data. So, the deduplication would be a nice feature to have.

We've had almost no stability issues.

We had an issue once and it turned out to be a bug. There was a memory leak and we had an issue in our DR site where one controller would reboot and then come back up and then, later on, the other controller would reboot and come back up. Then it happened once on our production site where both controllers went down at the same time. We worked with Dell Support and they found a memory leak and they recommended we upgrade to the latest code version.

They have a script you run, a utility to gather the logs, etc., and then they analyze. The hardest problem was that, because they're analyzing logs, they have a certain SLA in which to do that. Even though we had a production issue and we wanted it resolved right away, it took them a few days to analyze the logs and get back to us.

We've added more and more on to it, and had no issues with it. When we started there, they had just deployed Unity. It was used in a few places, but not all that much. We've been migrating more and more over to it to get off of and retire the VNX, and we've had no issues. The compression has been working well.

We came from a VNX platform and we had lots of performance issues on the VNX, especially when we were doing OS patching. When all the reboots happened at the same time, we had performance hits on the VNX, systems crashed, and so on. And with the Unity, we have no issues. It's much easier to manage than the VNX. I've been managing both, but I've found the Unity is a bit easier to manage and to deploy.

From what I understand, the VNX was coming off of support and our company worked directly with our Dell EMC rep to see what was out there, what we could use, which storage arrays have which features, and they went with Unity.

To go with all-flash with Dell EMC, you've got XtremIO and you've got Unity. Unity is the type of array that you can size yourself and say, "This is how much storage I want," and you can add on in the future. With XtremIO, you're buying a set package and you get what you get.

Each solution is dependent on the use case so it's really hard to give advice without knowing the exact use case the person is trying to fill. But we're very happy with Unity.

I rate it at nine out of ten. If they added dedupe, that would get me to a ten.

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.

We primarily use it for backup.

It is a good backup product.

• It is easy to manage. A lot of the system manages itself.
• It is nice the way ESRS works with remote support, being able to remote in and take a look at problems proactively.

• I would like to see more integration with other products.
• The interface can be a little challenging for someone new.

It is pretty reliable.

You can just add nodes and shelves to it.

The remote support is excellent.

We had a case automatically opened last night, and it is being handled.

Dell EMC has been around for a long time. Owning VMware is a big plus.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Support long-term
• Longevity
• Cost is always an issue.

We use our Dell EMC Unities to store the bank's data. We have one Unity in our production environment and another Unity at our disaster recovery site.

We use it in conjunction with VMware. We store all our virtual machines on Unity. 

The Dell EMC unity interface is simple to manage. We manage it by ourselves. We create logs to store data. It's also easy for us to use because we use other solutions which are built for Unity, like VMware, which are recovery points. They work with the Dell EMC Unity system, as these products integrate well in our environment. 

All our applications have been migrated to VMware.

It's very reliable. I have not had an issue with Dell EMC Unity. 

Their service is good. If there is an issue with our Unity, Dell will sometimes call me before I even know I received a notification. They will tell me that some disks are bad and needed replacement. Whenever we have issues, they respond very quickly. 

We are using all-flash disk, so the speed is very good.

The solution is stable.

We are a small bank. It is very scalable whenever we want to expand the disk storage. 

Dell EMC technical support is very good. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. They take you by the hand and walk you through every issue. They explain the issue and follow up on it.

Whenever we need help to service the system or apply any upgrades, their customer service is good.

We used Dell EMC for the setup. We had a Dell EMC engineer and a third-party engineer come in. The Dell EMC engineer came and set up what he had for the disk. He took away the complexity from us, so I didn't see it. We had a third-party help us as well during the installation. 

My part was mainly just administering the system. If I had an issue, I just made a short phone call to Dell EMC.

In the past, we used to have a physical server dedicated for Exchange or SQL. We have been able to virtualize those systems. Therefore, we cut our costs on the hardware and the backup is simpler in a VM environment. With Unity, we can easily replicate all our data to our production. 

For DR, the solution is very efficient for us. It has also allowed us to centralize our data repository.

While Dell EMC is costly, I don't have any complaints about their licensing model.

We have also used Dell EMC CLARiiON and Symmetrix within the Dell EMC shop. What attracted to us to Dell EMC Unity was its flash disk technology.

Outside of Dell EMC, we looked at IBM and HPE. However, we have VMware as a recovery point for replication, and those VMware solutions work together well with Unity.

The purchasing process was uncomplicated. We went through a third-party reseller who has a relationship with Dell. They know the product well, so they specialize in it. We gave them our needs and they were able to recommend the appropriate solution to Dell, the sizing, etc. This helped us out. 

We can sleep at night because the support is great.

We use it as block storage for a couple sites. 

The performance is fine for what it does. It is flash and spinning media.

For sites that we use it on, it gives us more flexibility and high availability solutions. It is easier to expand the site, if needed.

It is simple to use and easy to manage. We don't touch it after we set it up. It is not something you constantly have to go in everyday and tweak, which makes it beneficial.

• Ease of use: The GUI management is very easy to use.
• The management is easy for us. We rarely touch it now. It just runs.

I would like the UI to look better.

Stability is very good. It has been running for over a year now without problems. We haven't had any dropped layers.

The growth is difficult to forecast, but it's easy for the unit to grow when needed. It is very scalable.

The technical support does alright.

We didn't have a solution in place for the size that we needed to have a high availability solution. Dell EMC is our preferred storage provider, so we went out and worked with them to get a solution where we have a cluster environment to VMware and a failover with the other node along with shared storage.

The initial setup was very straightforward. This was not our first SAN array, so I just racked and stacked it, and they gave us the IPs and turned it over to us. 

The purchasing has been simple. When you do need storage, you spec it out. Then, you receive a quote back and make a decision from there. 

The last purchase was in China, so I was more on the config, less on the purchase side.

The solution should be cheaper.

We evaluated NetApp. We decided on Dell EMC because we are more familiar with them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Price.

We use it for virtualization. We have all of our servers virtualized on the entire unit.

The performance has been outstanding. It's amazing.

We currently have two Dell EMC Unities going. One of them at our primary on-premise DR site. They communicate with each other. If we ever have to failover, it is right there and ready.

We have integrated Dell EMC Unity XT with VMware, Exchange, Microsoft SQL, and all types of Windows servers running on it. It outperforms any other physical hardware that I have ever had. We had to purchase the licenses for the Exchange and SQL servers. We also had to purchase VMware, and that could be cheaper.

We are also using it with our Veeam solution for our backup. Everything is just integrated so seamlessly. It is great.

The ease of use. Being able to configure it was easy, which I liked. 

It is easy to manage. Managing it, I get alerts if there are any type of issues. I had a hard drive go bad, which had never caused any issues. Dell EMC contacted me, and said, "We are a shipping a new one out." My response was, "Why?" He told me that hard drive was bad. So, I went and looked, and it was. This was almost immediate. I never even knew anything had happened.

As frequently as updates come in, it has far more updates than anything else, Dell does it for you, which makes it simple to do them. I just sit back and watch them do it, so it's nice. It keeps us up-to-date and secure.

It should be lighter. It takes up a ton of rack space. It would be nice to have a smaller footprint. 

It might be nice to have more integrated features instead of having everything as a separate module, like the networking. The networking is attached separately in the back. It would be nice if that was more integrated with less ports.

One to three years.

Stability is perfect and consistent. We have had no downtime. It is reliable.

As far as hardware goes, we haven't had to scale up at all. We're staying pretty steady. 

As far as users go, I have about 1000 users on it right now, and it's not even at 50%. It's amazing as far as utilization goes.

Technical support is top-notch. I have talked to them a couple times. They definitely seem to know what they are talking about. They are pretty quick to get parts out, and getting a tech out there to replace them.

This is our first time that we moved into virtualization. We are largely an HPE shop.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I had a technician do it for me, then I looked over his shoulder because I had never done it before. He told me that he would do it this one time, and next time I would set it up because it was not that hard. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't impossible.

It was very easy to order. We went through and spec'd it out internally, then went through a Dell EMC partner and spec'd it out through them. The parts were here quickly, assembled, and all we had to do was mount it. We didn't have to do any configuring nor assembly, which was good.

Dell EMC did setup number one. Then, they shadowed me when I did the next setup. It's not simple, but it's doable. It's doable with the right guidance.

Deployment with the product is great.

When I first got the Dell EMC Unity system, I converted all of our physical machines to virtual, which:

• Eliminated the need for a $300,000 cost upfront to extend warranties.
• Eliminated the electricity that was being used along with other inadvertent items, such as cooling. The AC doesn't run as much in the data center now. 
• We went from about 45 servers down to one, which is amazing. 
• As far as purchasing additional servers, there is no need to buy hardware. It's all right there. Since we have deployed, this has easily saved us close to about $300,000 easily.

The time to set up has definitely improved. That is ROI for us. We save time spinning up a new server. If you ask me today for a new server, I can have it ready by the end up the day. When we were using hardware, it would take us about three weeks. We would have to provision a server. We would have to spec it out, buy it, assemble it, install the OS, back it, then we were finally ready to go. Whereas now, by the end of the day, I have a very nice server.

Simplicity of ownership is a no-brainer:

• Obtaining a warranty is easy.
• The price is very reasonable.
• As far as licensing goes, I love how VMware works with Dell EMC Unity. It's great. They work hand in hand. They have made it so simple.

We looked at VxRail, IBM, and Nutanix. Dell EMC Unity work out financially. VxRail was nice, but a lot more expensive and robust. Price-wise, Dell EMC Unity was right where we needed it to be.

Make sure to shop around to make absolutely 100% certain that it is what you want. You will want to come back to this particular model. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Pricing
• Knowledge: They know what they are talking about. 
• Aggressiveness: Are they vested in the pricing and product?

We are a medical center, so we have a very diverse ecosystem. We do a lot of imaging, which is our primary use case.

It is performing very well.

It has helped us be able to use less administrators per device or system. Therefore,we are more streamlined.

The management is key. This is where we see the functionality and ease of use. To be programmatically administered is huge, it is one of the key features that we like about it. My team finds it easy to manage.

We have integrated it with vSphere.

• The interface is easy to use.
• The ability to programmatically manage it.

It needs more functionality and the ability to move across more landscapes.

Stability is rock solid.

We haven't found a scale that we can't go to yet.

Historically, we are a Dell shop. We actually asked Dell's solution experts to come in and give us a suggestion of where we needed to go before purchasing this solution.

Our big return of investment is the ability to scale and not add FTE counts nor extra administration.

It was easy to order. We are a big Dell shop, so it was easy to purchase and get it in place, then up and running.

Find out what your use case is. Look at it across the board. Dell EMC has been good to us as a customer.

It is for users of VDI solutions.

• We use it to implement all our VDI solutions.
• It is easy to deploy and manage.
• We were able to integrate it very quickly with other solutions.

• Cheaper
• Its consumption of kVA

I would like to see more compression and deduplication added to the solution. Today, our compression is about 2:1 and other solutions give us about 4:1 or 5:1.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is good.

Ordering is easy, but the processing site and working with those companies was difficult.

The primary use case is to replace stream I/O and other VNX traditional spinning disks with a less expensive all flash. However, it should have the same five nines availability.

It's easier to carve out months and present them to hosts as opposed to some of the older Dell EMC solutions.

The majority of our vSphere environment is running on Dell EMC Unity. Exchange is also running on it. Most of our environment is split-up. Only really mission critical applications are on stream I/O. Unity has ended up being our main storage platform.

It is all cost-based. It's as good as a VMAX All Flash with stream I/O. In terms of our use case, we're not thinking of deduplication. However, looking at it based on cost per gigabyte, it's certainly very effective.

Dell EMC Unity is not sexy. It doesn't have all the flash and pizzazz of some of the other storage vendors.

We've had no issues with it. 

The performance is great. We have four or five different Unity arrays, and they have all run flawlessly.

I haven't used technical support.

Dell EMC did the entirety of the setup.

We have seen tremendous ROI.

Because of the attractive price, we were able to get rid of more expensive arrays, standardize, and get rid of a lot of spinning disks. We also got rid of more expensive flash that we weren't properly utilizing.

I've had so many nightmares with so many other arrays, but I have no complaints with Dell EMC Unity at this time.

It is a workhorse and will run even demanding workloads.

We are using it as a storage unit. We also using it at my customer site.

It is the storage provider that the company is using. The product is easy to manage.

It provides SAN capabilities and storage replication.

• The user interface could use improvement.
• They could move away from flash and make it an HTML5 file. 
• They should update to the cloud.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

The technical support is very professional and provides quick responses. 

When using the callback function, we found it to be good. It is also good for creating cases. 

I haven't experienced anything bad with the support yet.

I was not involved with the initial setup. I haven't worked with it that long.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: good support and fair price.

We use Dell EMC Unity XT as our primary storage, mostly for VMware, the tier-one storage of our VMs. We use it for SaaS and corporate. We do replications with it. I hate to call Unity your standard, basic storage, but it's your standard, basic, old-school, tried and true, reliable, classic storage. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done, has all the features you need, and is easy to use.

Performance-wise, we actually use ScaleIO for the high-performance stuff. But Unity, as your classic storage, does a fairly good job.

We actually use it just about everywhere because, in the majority of the use cases in our company, there is a need for a lot of storage but they don't have a lot of IOPS. Unity fits that use case well. For the areas that need high performance, the high IOPS, it doesn't fit. But that's okay. That's why you have multiple SAN solutions.

One of the benefits it brings is the value for its price. It has saved us a lot of money. It does the job. It just works. We just bought a bunch of new Unity's that allowed us to do a lot of consolidation. Those four Unity's replaced 13 VNXs and older Unity's. 

In terms of simplicity of ownership, I think we still have somewhere in the neighborhood 20 Unity's and they're managed by four storage guys. So, from a simplicity perspective, you can manage a lot of Unity's across a lot of data centers with a very small staff.

In addition to the price point, you factor in all the features, like replication, and that it works great.

Like most newer SANs, the interface is very simplistic. I'm still used to the old-school SAN where you need a PhD to be able to configure it. I'll pick on NetApp as an example. To work on a NetApp, needing a certification isn't a recommendation, it's a requirement. You don't want someone who hasn't had all the required training working on NetApp. On a Unity, you can throw it in a remote office and tell whoever is there, "Hey, go click on these buttons." And you really don't have to worry about them clicking on the wrong thing. 

Or if I even need them to rack and install the Unity, it's a handful of cables here and there, where it's called out and easy to follow. There is just no complexity to it. A lot of SANs are easy to use these days. Unity was - if I recall correctly, especially on the VNX line, before they changed the name to Unity - one of the first to really lead in having that simplistic interface; the "why make this hard?" mindset.

We have had some downtime. Nothing is perfect. Unity’s have had some code-release problems, versions that, from a compatibility perspective, had some glitches which caused an outage. But, given the amount of Unity’s we run, that has been fairly minor and it hasn't happened at scale or across all of our Unity’s. 

It's more like, "Hey, we have a new code. Let's deploy it," and we have a situation where we can deploy it in a given location first. So we deploy in that location. Oops, it has an issue. Roll back and get Dell EMC engaged and resolve it and move on.

It hasn't really been that big of a deal. As a great "for instance," with ExtremeIO - which we bought starting about two years ago, and deployed in one of our divisions as their primary storage because we needed performance there - it's had so many issues that upper management has essentially banned us from ever buying an ExtremeIO again, because of the downtime. Either because of compatibility or just straight up code problems, it's just not a stable SAN. And the one thing you want out of a SAN is that it has to be stable.

So as long as Unity remains good and stable, that will be a primary reason that we use it.

It scales decently to 100,000 IOPS, maybe 150,000. But as long as your IOPS requirements are below that, it does a great job.

With the nature of the architecture, there's a limitation to its total, possible throughput. So if you need IOPS above that 150,000 mark, your Unity engineer will say something like, "Oh, we just need to cluster it and do that." That's a very old-school approach. If you need more IOPS than what Unity SAN can provide, clustering is not a great option. The better option is to go with a SAN with better IOPS. Unity is good at what Unity does, so don't try to make it do what it doesn't do. It's great for bulk storage, up to a certain performance level. If you use it for that, it works great.

On a per-SAN basis we could have 3,000 to 6,000 VMs connecting to it.

Technical support is responsive, of course. If it's obviously a Unity issue, it's usually a pretty simple and straightforward fix.

It's when they say, "Well, no, the Unity's fine. It must be an issue with the host. Or it must be an issue with the VM," where you get a little bit of that finger-pointing going on. Then it becomes that struggle of stopping the finger-pointing. It's all one company so let's all get on the same phone call and figure out where the problem is.

That is usually something we have to start, whereas from a Dell EMC/VMWare/whatever-else-is-involved perspective, they're not the ones to start that bridge or that conversation.

Especially if it's a production outage, I don't care about finger-pointing. I don't want to hear about it. No one does within the organization. They want it fixed. If you don't think it's a SAN problem but it's clearly an issue with the SAN, let's get everyone involved who needs to be involved and fix the problem.

So it would be great, in terms of future support calls that fall under that finger-pointing category, to have them say, "Okay, we need to now engage so and so. Let's get them on the call."

We had a lot of VNXs that we retired and we moved over to Unity. But that's just a natural progression of the product line. We also replaced a lot of old VMAXs with Unity. It might not be the sexiest box but its performance has grown through the generations to the point where it can do the job we used to have to buy VMAXs for.

We replaced the VNXs due to multiple factors. End-of-life was a big aspect; end of service contracts. It's cheaper to install a Unity than to renew the maintenance on an old SAN. That's where it's at. 

We were able to reduce our monthly spend significantly enough by doing that consolidation that we were actually able to buy the ScaleIO's we needed for another division.

When I look for a vendor to work with, I care more about the product than the vendor. Personally, I am most happy with a mixed environment. A mixed environment tends to be typically configured to best practices more frequently, with fewer proprietary aspects. Those proprietary aspects are typically what box you in or prevent you from doing something as technology changes. By running a mixed environment, you have more flexibility and ability. With that being said, I run all things VMWare. So it's a relative thing.

From a SAN perspective, storage-wise, I look at storage as a commodity. That's really what it is. Give me a server. I don't care what it is. Give me a SAN. I don't care what it is. Make it cheap, let it hit the performance marks I need, and make it reliable. If it's those three things, what it is doesn't matter to me. Whether it's a Unity or something else, I don't care. I'm not buying the brand, I'm not buying the vendor. I'm buying a commodity.

Like I said, Unity wins on ROI. As long as it wins on ROI, as long as it wins on uptime, as long as it does the job it's doing, it will continue to be the one that gets installed. When it fails to meet those, we'll switch.

We used to have a lot of NetApp. We've always bought BMC. But we have had no problem changing vendors. We buy a lot of Cisco. We don't care what the server is. The Dell EMC servers are cheaper, so that's what we go with. It's all about satisfying the base requirements and getting the job done.

I've installed Unity’s, but it's been a few years. The setup is a piece of cake. It's super easy: click, click, click, done.

Regarding upgrades, the guys who take care of that do so on a very regular basis with no real issues. They do it through maintenance windows. But at the end of the day, they really haven't had too many problems; a few of those minor problems I've mentioned, but overall, it works well.

From an ROI perspective, I'll put it this way: When we've tried to buy other SANs, the Unity ROI makes it impossible to buy them. So usually, the only time we buy another SAN is when the ROI isn't a factor, when Unity can't do the job. From an ROI perspective, it's great because it beats out everything else.

We've tried to look at other options but, at the end of the day, when you price it out, the Unity wins.

Its biggest valuable feature is its price point for the amount of storage and performance you get. It's a sweet spot. It's cheaper than the other SANs out there, but performs well enough. It fits that nice, middle-ground portfolio.

If your small office or data center needs a couple petabytes, or just lots and lots of storage, it works great. Or if you need just a couple of hundred terabytes worth of storage, it works great. The price point hits that right spot.

As for advice to someone who is interested in this type of solution, I would simply say, "Talk to so and so, because that's what they do, and have fun." We use it across the board. So if someone needs a Unity for their project and they want their own SAN for some reason, they just have to go through the approval process. There's no fight to buying a Unity, because again, from an ROI perspective, no one argues.

In terms of the buying process, I'll start with getting a quote. I find it's pretty easy, mainly because I worked as a consultant, so I actually would build those BOMs (bills of materials); the pre-quote build. For me, it's super easy - because I've done that career-wise - to build a BOM for a SAN, Unity, or otherwise. Typically you have your BOM. And from the BOM you get your quote. From the quote you get your invoice. The BOM is the first step. You get your approvals, that this is the configuration I want.

So it is easy for me but not necessarily for your "Joe Average" person, for the rest of the storage guys. Their typical response is, "Okay, I need a new Unity with these IOPs and this capacity. Go." And they just have our partner, through whom we buy this stuff, build the BOM. The partner sends it to us and says, "Hey, this is what we're doing for you." We say, "Okay, it looks great." And it moves forward. The struggle is after you get past that point, on our side, where it goes through our approval, what we call the CAR process. That's where it takes some time. That's not necessarily a Dell EMC issue or even an issue with our partner. That's an internal logistics and political issue.

I would rate this solution at eight out of 10 because, at the end of the day, it is an old-school SAN. It really doesn't take advantage of any of the modern-day advances in SAN technology.

We're using it to host development workloads and it's performing as expected.

Dell EMC Unity XT is cheap and deep storage. It fits the business need that we had. I'm sure there are a number of other products out on the market that compete just as well.

One of the most valuable features is its cost. It was inexpensive compared to other arrays that we were looking at.

It's also easy to manage. I have 20 years of managing EMC storage and it has been the same from day one, pretty much.

We have also integrated it with vSphere and SQL. There were no costs involved outside of our normal workload licensing, no costs that were specific to the Unity platform.

It does what we bought it for. I don't know that there's anything else that it needs to do that we're not leveraging from it already. From a product perspective, I don't see any room for improvement.

From a service perspective, they can do nothing but go uphill.

One to three years.

It runs. It operates. Developers can do their development work. It's not screaming-fast, but it doesn't fall down when you bring up a workload. So it's performing as expected.

We did encounter a firmware bug which actually caused loss of data. There was some heartburn around that. But in general, it has operated as expected, except for that bug. Fortunately, we found the bug in pre-production, so we didn't lose anything that we needed. However, had it been in production, we'd be having a very different conversation about Unity.

I can't really comment on scalability. We bought the frame fully loaded. I don't know whether it scales or not. I suppose if I bought a unit that had half the capacity, it would scale to the max capacity. That wasn't my need.

Technical support has gotten progressively worse. In the past 24 months, give or take, the amount of attention from Dell EMC support for flagship products, both the Unity platform - which replaced VNX - and their VMAX platform: Their support teams and R&D have gone down under the Dell regime.

Our customer service, our support, the engineers that we get on the phone, the hassles that we put up with at level-one and level-two, didn't exist three or four years ago with EMC. We paid a premium for EMC products and you got a premium service as part of that investment. We don't get that anymore.

Set up went flawlessly.

Generally, with these types of products, there is not really much documentation from the build and configure perspective. There's a config sheet that you work on with your SE team. But it's not like going out and getting a packaged product from a Best Buy and implementing. There is an expectation from the config sheet for fiber connections, network connections, speeds and feeds, and the like. That is enterprise-class architecture. That's out-of-the-box. 

Dell EMC came in and did the implementation. They were knowledgeable.

I didn't put together an ROI for this product. We had a fixed budget that we wanted to invest in storage for development teams. This fit the bill.

Pricing was competitive compared to other products on the market. Among the ones we considered, Unity came in with the best price.

Compared to other EMC platforms, Unity is nice because it is all-inclusive, in terms of the licensing model. That's unique for them, compared to other manufacturers. It is beneficial. We could use replication, native, right out-of-the-box.

We looked at NetApp, Infinidat, Pure. 

My advice is: Stay up to date on code.

Regarding the purchasing process, we went through a VAR and it was easy. Once pricing was established, the bill of materials was defined, we paid for the product, and it showed up.

In terms of important criteria when selecting a vendor, from an executive perspective, it's partnership. From my team's perspective, it's probably 

• usability
• performance
• stability.

I want it up, I want it to stay up, and I don't want to have to manage it.

I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. It's not an all-flash array so it's not the fastest thing on the market. But the stability has been good, minus the initial bug. It does what we ask of it.

Our use case is very unique. We just need it in our offices.

It used to be a complex product. Now, it is becoming simpler. 

Overall, the feedback from my team has definitely been positive.

• Its simplicity and simple management. 
• Auto-features for data protection.
• Being able to expand the product.
• The Unisphere management interface: We are very familiar with it. It manages all the EMC devices that we have. Management is easy because it is part of Unisphere, which is self-learning.
• The support for Dell EMC is excellent.

I would like to see a more seamless virtual box integration with the physical box which can replicate, because the setup of the replication is very difficult right now. We tried it multiple times, and while the physical box is easy, when we mixed it with a virtual edition and it seemed very complex. We been trying this for several months, even with the cabling included. We are still working on it.

No issues so far. It is very stable.

It is scalable. We can always add additional tools if we need to expand it. 

We had been using VNX for a long time that it is now a part of our lifecycle. We introduced Dell EMC Unity into our environment to replace the VNX.

We contact our VAR, get a quote, and order all the hardware. Then, they ship and install it with a Dell EMC engineer. It is very straightforward.

We can see improvement since moving to the inclusive licensing.

The Dell EMC Data Protection license covers everything, like a one stop shop. All our options are covered. 

We have worked with different vendors. However, right now, we are sticking with Dell EMC Unity as it seems like it is a very solid, mature product.

Do your homework. Obtain all the use cases. See what license you need and purchase the license as part of your preparation. Then, the process will be smooth.

We do integration with vSphere, but it is very limited because we outsource with IBM. 

We use it for storage for our ESXi hosts at our smaller sites.

It increased our uptime because we switched from physical stuff to virtual stuff, and being able to have that we could do the high-availability and failover.

I like the ease of configuration, the quick setup, and the fact that it seems to be hardened. We haven't had any issues with them. In terms of simplicity of ownership, once they're running you don't have to touch them.

They're also simple to manage. We came from the VNXe 3200s so it's very similar.

We integrated it with vSphere but that integration was "iffy". It was okay but we had a few challenges with it.

It's very solid. No issues at all. The only issue we have is that the power supply ramps up and down and makes some noise on SPA. But other than that being a nuisance, we haven't had any reliability issues at all.

Scaling is easy. Just add drives, extend the space. It's super simple.

We called them and put in a service ticket on the power supply issue. We tried a few things and then they sent us another one, but other than that we haven't had any issues. They've been easy to work with.

The initial setup was straightforward. Coming from the VNXe's, it was almost identical, just has a different GUI platform. It was very easy.

The price is up a little bit from what we used to pay so I'm hoping that it's a little bit of a better system than the VNXe was. But I still think it's a good value. It's new, so I'm sure there's room for the pricing to drop.

We did have an issue with licensing once but we were able to reach out to the licensing group and do an online chat. They helped instantly, so that was nice.

My advice is to follow the installation guide, it's pretty straightforward, step-by-step.

In terms of the purchasing process, after we had figured out what we wanted, it became easy. But we had to get into our first set of standards. The first one that we ordered had the SFP module cards in it, which we didn't need. We just use the 10-gigabit copper. After figuring out our standard template, it has become super simple every time.

What I look for when selecting a vendor to work with is somebody who

• is big
• guarantees their product
• has good support; somebody who is going to answer their phone 24/7.

So far, I rate the Unity a nine out of 10. It has been easy to set up, we've only had a few small issues. Once they're set up, they're running, you don't have to touch them. The one point I held back is because we're new to them. The version we're using is the 300 and it's also new out there so there has been a little bit of a struggle here and there with some small things; for example, the fans ramping up and we have one right now that's not responding after updates.

It fits what we're trying to do. It has everything and more. There are some features that we're not even using yet.

It's our storage solution. We have a Dell EMC Unity 400. The performance is great.

The fact that it's hybrid is the most valuable feature. We have the SSD so we put our SharePoint on there and some of the stuff that requires a little more speed. For SharePoint, we want the pages to respond a little more quickly. And it's nice to be able to use the slower storage for stuff that we don't need as quickly, like file servers. If they're a little slow, it's okay, nobody really complains. Overall, the hybrid is what we really like about it.

I like that when you log in it gives you a dashboard of what your storage looks like. Pretty cool with that.

In the dashboard there could be notification of duplicate files and the like, so we don't have to rely on Windows to do that. They have all the files in the Dell EMC so that would help us out.

I haven't had any issues with it at all. The stability has been very good.

Dell EMC is one of the best in terms of scalability. They can just add another component to it. It's so modular so it's super easy. The scalability is very nice.

We had a year's worth of support from them when we first bought it. They were very responsive, whether via email or phone calls. We could get a tech onsite if we wanted to, to help us with the installation.

We had Tintri before. It was good, it's also a very simple solution. The problem was that they got too expensive, once you tried to scale up with them. They quoted us something like $800,000. We said to ourselves, "Um, let's go to Dell EMC. We know Dell, we know EMC, so let's just switch."

In the industry in which we work, a lot of people use Dell EMC and there weren't a lot of Tintri users. Being able to reach out to somebody in another company who uses Dell EMC makes that partnership with everyone a lot easier too.

Setting it up was super easy, as is the management of it. We used the same thing for setting up a disaster site and it was pretty seamless.

I don't know an actual number for ROI but, especially because we are a small IT shop, having something that is easy, that doesn't take a lot of time to set up, monitor, and manage helps us a ton. We can focus on other things.

When you look at what Dell EMC is compared to, like NetApp, they're all priced pretty similarly. I think the pricing of the hybrid model is good. Obviously, we would want cheaper prices but you can't get everything.

My advice would be to use their support. If you bought it, have them come onsite, have them help you set it up, make sure you get comfortable with it. If you bought the support have someone come onsite. It's like free training. Don't wing it.

Primary use case is block and file. It's like a combo device. It has performed well, except for the migration process.

It requires a lot less management.

• All-flash performance
• Snapshotting capabilities
• Replication

It's good. It has a lot of good features.

I think there are a couple of things on the file side that we're lacking from the VNX world. It would be nice if we got some of those back. I think there are limitations on how many file systems you can back up at a time. Whereas you can do, I believe, eight continuous per data mover on the file side on the VNX, you can only do something like two or four on Unity. If they could step up to that, that would be good.

It was difficult at first. It wasn't very stable. It was crashing a lot. I think we were early adopters and, during the file side of migration, it crashed a number of times.

Scalability is good, although we only have a 400F. I think we missed out on getting the 450, but it seems to be fairly scalable.

Tech support is good. Just like most of the EMC products, there is a knowledgeable staff.

Setup was fairly straightforward, although we had EMC onsite to give us a hand.

The important criteria for us when selecting a vendor are

• relationship
• quality of product.

I would rate the Unity between seven and eight out of 10. It's not quite at the level of what the VNX was, but it's one of those products that is improving with time.

I would definitely recommend you look at Unity.

It's a tier-two storage array. The performance is okay.

The all-flash array and the compression ratio are benefiting us. We still have to migrate a couple of systems. We are still in the process of doing it and we'll know better afterward. But, we've seen some good improvements. For example, we put it on one of the file servers and the backup performance improved quite a lot.

It has the same operating system for both file and block, and it actually simplifies everything. It's much smaller compared to VNX.

I have just been to one of the briefing sessions, here at the Dell EMC World 2018 conference, and they released a very cool feature, Snapshot replication, which is very interesting. I'm excited about that.

Stability seems to be good but we had some issues recently because of a bug in the system. We were presenting LANs to the Unity array but I think it caused a disruption to the host. EMC did acknowledge it and provided an alternative way to do it. We felt that this could have been avoided. It caused downtime to the host on two occasions.

Scalability for the 650F is good, but I was expecting a little bit more than that.

Technical support was helpful. I would have appreciated it if it were a lot faster, but we got a resolution for our issue.

We come from VNX, and we also have VMAXs.

When selecting a vendor we look at the 

• performance 
• scalability
• price.

First of all, it should meet the business requirements such as performance, and it should be compatible with all applications. Then we will look at the third factor which is the price.

Regarding advice, it depends on the size of the business. Unity, price per Gig, is actually a good system. In fact, I'm thinking of moving some of the old VMAX arrays to Unity because of the price performance per Gig. If the stability makes sense, then I'm actually going to move it.

We had a stand-alone storage system and we wanted to purchase a Metro Cluster system. We looked at other companies and we found EMC was the best of them. That's why we choose them.

At the moment it's a cluster, we use it in different data centers. In case of any interruption, a power cut or something, our data will be continuously available.

At the moment we are using it with VPLEX. VPLEX is a very big advantage for us. We don't use very many of the Unity's functions. But it does provide good provisioning, allowing us to save space. We use all-flash systems and they are quite fast.

The monitoring part could be better. With EMC storage systems - or Unity and VPLEX, because I'm using them, for the moment - the monitoring part is very difficult. They should improve this to have a better reporting system.

The stability is quite okay. We have not had any downtime with the Unity. We have only been using it for three months. We have just finished the migrations, but so far it is working quite well.

For us, it's scalable.

Setup was very easy.

When selecting a vendor, as a technical guy, it's the power or bandwidth, the technical details, that are more important to me.

I would definitely tell a colleague to go for Unity.

The main use case for my clients is for mid-range storage performance. It's primarily all-flash arrays. It's always with two sides replicated. It's working well.

The architecture is robust. I know that it has changed a lot with the advent of the all-flash. But it was the good, old-fashioned storage array, block array for customers. It's reliable.

The feedback I have is it's quite stable. We have a configuration with VPLEX. The issues are not coming from the Unity itself, in general. It's more about the SAN or the VPLEX, the virtualization layer. On that specific point, I'd say the Unity is doing well. It's reliable.

The market I'm working, in Switzerland, is quite small. The Unity, in terms of scalability, covers 90% of our use cases.

Replication with VMware - it's called the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster - is lacking in the Unity and is present in Compellent. In general, that's a key decision metric. If we need to have synchronous replication... That's why we had to use VPLEX, because it's not in the Unity. Look out for this. If that kind of setup is not required, you should always go for Unity.

We use the Unity as the SAN for our data center. It's where all of our data lives right now, for our main office. It has exceeded our expectations.

We have simplified it down to where we're using one storage pool inside the Unity, whereas on the VNX, we had multiple storage pools. This has simplified that aspect for us. It would depend on each organization. We're heavy into VMware and this ties into it so simply. It's made it a lot easier for us.

We're very familiar with the VNX series, we were using VNX before Unity. The features sets are very similar but what I like is the way it ties into VMware. When I create a datastore inside Unity, it just shows up in VMware. I love that tie-in.

Stability is excellent. We have never had downtime with Unity.

Scalability is great. We haven't scaled up very much, but it's definitely easy to do.

We have only had to use technical support for firmware upgrades. They are helpful.

We were using VNX. Our Dell rep stays in touch with us fairly often. He keeps us knowledgeable about things that are up and coming and what might be a good fit for us. The business makes the decision. 

When looking at a vendor what's important are 

• price
• support
• the product.

Price is definitely going to be a factor. More than that, you want something that's solid. You're going to pay a little bit more for something that performs better and is more efficient at what it does, makes your life easier.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We're probably going to go away from the Unity and end up using VxRail and vSan. Hyperconvergence is all the rage, that is where everything is going, so that's where we're headed. We need the hyperconverged, we need the elasticity - that we can spin things up and spin them down quickly and easily. We can't do that right now.

I would definitely steer a colleague towards Unity if they were looking at that versus NetApp, for example.

We had old systems - CX4-960 and Celerra - and we wanted to consolidate the systems to the Unity platform for the customer because the old systems were very expensive for maintenance.

The only reason we made this move was to save costs, to be honest.

It's easy to handle for administrators and it's a unified system. It's not as complex as Celerra systems or CX4 Clariions to administrate. You can do everything with one GUI.

In the next release, I would like to see stable performance on AIX. AIX are mostly mission-critical systems, so the support has to be there.

We have had a lot of issues. We've got massive issues at the moment with IBM AIX. It's not stable. We have a lot of disk errors, production crashes sometimes, and that's not good for a retailer.

Also, we still have to administer the Celerra because we have massive issues with the filer system of Unity. We hope it gets better with the 4.2 or 4.3 release. We do not have the integration for connection to Centara. This means we have to keep the data on Celerra and cannot migrate to Unity.

Scalability is not good. We have a Unity 300, now we have to do a data-in-place conversion for the next upgrade because only 150 slots are supported, not drives, only slots. So my job next week is to do an in-place upgrade from 300 to 400.

The setup was complex but it was one of the first Unity systems in Germany. We sold it in August two years ago.

If you plan to use Unity as a filer system take a bigger controller because with the 300 and 400 you have performance issues compared with other filer systems. For pure filer systems, I would recommend an Isilon or NetApp, or something like that. Unity is a unified solution, if you have to do unified, but it's better to separate if you have more data.

Primary use case is mid-range to low-end storage, and it performs very well for that type of operation.

We just recently put together a large customer deal. They're going to use Unity's for applications at remote sites, so it's essentially a robo operation. Its main advantage over vSAN was the rebuild, the intelligence of the restoration in the event of a hardware drive failure and, of course, the all-flash solution.

The flexibility of the paradigm and, obviously, its price point.

I'd like to see more of the NVMe back-end for the flash. And the big deal with the PowerMax is that they've used all U2 drives so that they can avoid having to take it down. I see using M.2 and modular sections as being a real nice alternative that could be implemented in Unity at a fairly low cost.

Obviously, we haven't had it in the field for years, but we haven't had any problems with it and we've deployed close to 150 of them.

It's not really scalable. Up to mid-range requirements, it's just fine. But scalability takes you to the enterprise-class, and that's more high-end VNX or low-end Symmetrix.

We've used technical support but it wasn't Unity's fault, it was the customer's. The tech support is very good.

Setup is simple.

For our applications, we'd rate Unity at eight out of 10. It would be a 10 if it had a lower cost. That's really the issue. The value point is, once you get into the Unity spectrum, you're looking at a lot of competitive offerings, and they're appealing to a limited class requirement, so the demands are not as stringent.

In terms of advice, find out what your storage group's expertise level is and their background, and then see if they don't already have experience with Unity or one of the others in the family. It seems to be a natural fit that way.

Right now, we're using it as overflow storage. We initially had a VNX and an Isilon. We needed to grow out further, and we thought that Unity would be a good way to do that. Right now, we're using it a secondary storage platform, VVols across it, and using it directly for VMware storage.

The flash aspects of the Unity make it incredibly fast. The fact that you get that much storage directly on what is basically a 3U box to us, that density has been really useful.

• The easy setup.
• We really enjoy the HTML5. 
• The VVols have worked seamlessly with VMware.

We haven't gotten that deep into it yet to suggest improvements, but based on what we've been seeing here at the Dell EMC World 2018 conference, we'll be looking to make sure CloudIQ is set up for it.

We haven't seen an issue with it since the day we installed. It has been only two months but it's good.

We really enjoy the scalability, absolutely. We're running one box right now, but the fact that we can add additional compartments as needed is extremely useful, and we will probably go that way in the future.

We've had to use very little tech support, but so far it has been fine. Mostly we had some assistance with it during setup and haven't needed it since. When we needed them they were there for us, helpful, on schedule.

We've been using Isilon and VNX. We heard about Unity here, at the conference, two years ago, and had started to look into it. Obviously, as flash has continued to get cheaper compared to spinning disk, it makes a natural choice.

When selecting a vendor, responsiveness and accountability are incredibly useful. A really important part was the support we got out of EMC for Isilon. Often, we'll hear from them that disks are ready to be replaced. They're getting to us, setting their pace, getting out there without much interference from us.

In terms of price, I would say that the support you're getting with it is probably an underestimated value that comes with the box you're buying.

I would tell a colleague this makes a very sound investment. It's very reasonable density for space. The extendability is extremely useful. It's hard to choose a competitor at that level that would do it better.

Most of our customers buy it for data storage for the ERP that they use in their businesses. Most of them have a preference for the flash model.

All of them are very satisfied with the performance. It's very good equipment. Our customers give us very good feedback about it, they are very satisfied.

It's very easy to manage the whole system. We can put all the virtualized servers in one place, so they can share and manage the devices very easily.

It is very high-speed. The compression is also a very good feature, and the deduplication as well.

No complaints about the stability. Our customers are very happy with it.

Most of our customers are medium-sized businesses. My market, my targets, they don't need high-scale performance. But I know the scalability is very good and you can scale very easily.

The TCO is very good. Our customers invest and they get a good return.

When selecting a vendor, I choose the storage to fit the value and budget that the customer can afford. I can set most of them up with Unity, but sometimes I need to give them something with a lower cost. Sometimes, the price point is a little bit high in our market.

Unity is equipment that, if you sell it, you don't have any headaches with it. It's very good, its performance is very good. We are very satisfied.

Our primary use case is for our product, Oracle Database, and it's performing very well.

The benefit of the solution is that it allows us to maintain an Oracle Database for our product, for our customers. Given the performance of the Unity array, we've been able to do more with less.

It's just a solid platform.

I would like to see better compression, better dedupe. It's not nearly as good as what is built into the XtremIO. I understand why that is the case, but if they can take some of that technology and leverage that a little bit better in the Unity array, that would be great. That would be the first improvement.

It's rock solid. All of the EMC arrays are rock solid. I wouldn't expect anything less.

Scalability is phenomenal.

Technical support is typically very good. The only issue is, where our products are located. it's hard to get technical support in there. Only certain individuals can go in there, so finding that right, cleared person is sometimes a challenge.

This is just the next generation. We started with the CX models, we went to the Celerra, and now we're only blocks. We've used the 5300, the 5400s. We've used them all for years and years.

When selecting a vendor what's important are 

• price
• the name
• the product itself 
• most importantly, stability. 

I need to know that I've got a device that's running and it's not going to go down; that has rock-solid stability. That's the issue.

The initial setup is different from the VNX arrays and the CX arrays, which we have played with and used for years. The interface is just different.

Previously, we manually did all of our RAID groups. We didn't use the pools in the VNX2, we just went down to RAID groups because that would give us the best performance. We could maintain that performance, we could control that. With Unity, that went away, so that was a little bit of a learning curve. We had to understand and learn to trust that it was going to do what it needed to do.

Compared to XtremeIO, the unity is a two out of 10. Compared to other products, like Compellent, which is a Dell product, I think it's better than the Compellent. I think it's better than the 3PAR, I think it's better than the Netapp. The whole VNX/Unity line has been the industry leader, as far as I'm concerned. if I were to rank the Unity against all of its equivalent competitors, I would say it's probably a nine out of 10.

I would give a colleague the advice that he needs to look at what his product does, or what the use case is for that device. The Unity array is, by design, block, with unified on top of it. NetApp is, by default, file, with a block added on, which is kind of a hybrid; it's not really block at all. It depends on what you're doing. If you're looking for a filer, NetApp is the way to go. But if you're looking for block storage, by far EMC Unity is the way to go. That is its design.

The primary use case is block storage for ESX and structured data, SQL Database primarily.

We have adopted the all-flash array. It eliminates all the overhead of tiering and a lot of the data structuring overhead involved. It gives us a lot of operational efficiencies.

Being able to bring those multiple groups into a central solution. From a storage perspective, that is a bit of a challenge. 

There are also DR and data protection functions that we found in the new Unity, now that we are stepping up from VNX and other storage appliances, that we've started implementing.

The one thing that we would look at would be if they were to expand the file level features, just to give us a balance or a tier between it and Isilon options out there, for unstructured data.

We have never had any problem beyond that which you would assume you might get out of a storage system.

It will scale as much as we want or need. Scalability is not a concern.

We have not had to use tech support often, beyond the normal occasional drive, standard part replacement. The support has been good.

We've been a long time EMC customer. For us, though, it's been a journey of modernization and standardization. We took a couple different storage platforms and then centralized it on the Unity.

When selecting a vendor, from my perspective, I like to come up with the technically best solution possible, and then work retroactively into the price. Then, obviously, the business will make that decision based on price point and other things. But we try not make that one of the deciding factors.

My advice would be, if you're looking for this kind of solution, one of the challenges we had was clearly defining the use case. There is a lot of preparation in clearly identifying the workloads that you're going to put on it.

We're running virtual machines and we're using the NAS filer for file shares.

It has reduced the latency in application and database reads and writes, which is of benefit to the business.

All-flash, it's fast. We have the 650 model which is all-flash, upgraded from VNX. It just flies.

I can't think of any improvements, other than bringing down the price point. That would help.

It seems rock solid so far.

At this point, we're at the high end. I don't know that we have a lot of room to scale up, but I think it's going to meet our needs for a while.

My colleague did a firmware upgrade recently and that went well. I would say that was a good experience with tech support.

We were running out of disk space, and there was some latency that we wanted to improve on. We had the VNX previously.

When selecting a vendor, the price is always important, but we need a product that supports our business, It's both those factors.

The setup went relatively well. It was straightforward. We got migrated over quickly, so I have been very pleased with all of it.

It's working well for us so far. We haven't had it long enough to have a full-term answer, but I am very pleased with it so far.

In terms of advice to a colleague, if it's a mid-size company that has a similar needs to ours, I think the Unity is a good option.

It is primarily for block storage for VMware in our Americas data centers, and it is also used for block storage and file storage in our European data centers.

It's a much smaller footprint than our older storage arrays, which take up some six tiles, a lot of space in the data center. The Unity's are a lot smaller, and they're a lot faster.

We use the all-flash arrays so the performance is probably the most valuable feature. As features go, deduplication and compression are important too.

I would like to see them add Storage Groups, like we have had in Clariions and VNXs. Storage Groups would be a great addition.

We've had no issues with it whatsoever, as far as stability goes.

We have not had to add capacity to them. I would imagine it's going to scale well, we just haven't had to add capacity.

The support is very good.

It was just a refresh.

When selecting a vendor, the criteria for us would be 

• track record
• stability
• support.

I work for a rather large law firm and they're not typically that price sensitive but, obviously, we need to be good stewards of the firm's money as well.

The setup was pretty quick, pretty easy.

At this point, I would give the Unity an eight out of 10. I think it's a little bit early on in the development of features. But overall, it has performed well.

There are some alternatives, but what we've found, working with our partners, for mid-range storage it's probably the best one you could choose. There are other offerings from other vendors, but it's a good choice.

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.

Most of the systems are replacements for ancient VNXs. For most of the customers, we suggest they be replaced by Unity.

For our customers, the benefits are that it's not too expensive and it has almost all of the features from the beginning.

• Simplicity.
• Ease of management.
• It's still running on the ancient systems, so the customers know what they are getting.

I can't really think of any improvements for the next release.

The ease of installation, sometimes, for the customers, is not that positive because the customers think they can do it themselves. Sometimes that is a bit of an issue.

Very stable. Sometimes you can have issues, but they are usually solved with an upgrade of the system.

We have had two issues: replication between two Unity's, and when running several Snapshots on the Unity.

Scalability for us is not yet much of an issue because most of our customers are running on rather small systems.

Sometimes our customers use tech support but, generally, tech support is in order.

Setup is very straightforward. Compared to the VNXs, it's rather easy.

I would rate the Unity at eight out of 10, because of the ease of management compared to the ancient systems. For us, in Belgium, it is more small and medium businesses, so Unity is a good solution.

My advice is to choose the Unity.

Most of our customers are using it for Microsoft workloads, like SQL Server, Exchange, on-premise use. We have one customer running Oracle on it, all-flash.

They find the performance amazing from what they're coming from. Some of them say it's blazingly fast. They've switched to all-flash.

The whole cycle of provisioning and acquisition has been simplified for our customers. Also, the deployment and general maintenance of it has been greatly simplified. It has cut into our professional services quite a bit.

For our customers, it's the simplicity of it. They find it easy to use, along with the added features, the dynamic volumes. Things like that have been a big improvement over past generations.

The features they have added have been great, they've greatly simplified it. Bigger, faster. They're always leap-frogging, so the next generation, I'm sure, will have newer processors in it. They have improved leaps and bounds on the interface and ease of use, and I would like to see them keep doing that.

They should have more wizards for customers so they can do more of the self-service types of functions, in terms of upgrades and patching, although it's pretty easy right now.

Also, I would like to see more migration tools. When we're putting the Unity in, I would like to see more capability to migrate from third-party storage platforms, competitive platforms. Migrating from their own platforms is pretty straightforward.

We've had no issues. The customers talk to us before they do an upgrade and we say, "Yeah, it should be no problem." They go ahead and do it themselves now, and there have been no outages or unplanned downtime.

There have been no scalability issues with our customer base. Our customers are maybe, at most, a few hundred terabytes, so scalability is not an issue.

Before they do an upgrade, our customers will talk to us and they will also talk to Dell EMC support. From what I know, our customers are very happy with the support they receive from Dell EMC.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I can't give any product a 10 out of 10. But I'm happy with it, I'd give it an eight out of 10. It has been a good product for us in terms of selling it, keeping the customer community happy. 

My advice would be, download the virtual edition of Unity and try it out. Get used to the interface and ease of use. Also, take a look at the cloud-based analytics and the other pieces that go with it, to round out the solution.

Most of our customers use it on-premise, 90 percent of our customers use VMware vSphere on top of it, and a little more than half of them use Fibre Channel to connect to the Unity. They use it for most of their workloads.

Our customers have a competitive edge when compared to the other solutions in the market. Most of our customers don't just look at the value per Gig, they put a great value on the after-sales support and the stability of the appliances.

It's the simplicity, and most of all it's backed up by Dell EMC support, which is very valuable.

There aren't any improvements that come to mind, none that are obvious. After what I've seen today, here at the Dell EMC World 2018 conference, they pretty much have the next couple of years covered. For example, the current buzzword is the Cloud Tiering Appliance which allows you to tier data from your on-premise to the cloud or on-premise cloud.

To me, the stability is impeccable.

Scalability is good.

Tech support is very good, very efficient.

Setup is straightforward. Once you do it once, it's a walk in the park.

The backing of the vendor is important. In Dell EMC's case, we know that there is always someone backing us, just in case we get stuck.

A rating out of 10 out of 10 is a bit too much because, obviously, no product is super perfect, but I would rate the unity a good nine. What might make it a 10 is a better price.

I would vouch for this solution, I would definitely say go for it.