Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

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.