Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

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.

It helps our customers save money because it's at a price point where a lot of our customers can easily bring it in for different projects and it will also provide for DR. I find that the cost has really enabled them to do a little bit more with it.

It performs great. Customers really like it. I've had a lot of customers go from the previous platforms up to Unity. They've noticed better performance with it.

What they really like is the easy licensing now - Dell EMC has caught up to a lot of their competitors - based on not having to charge for everything, and they can get everything in one bundle.

Ease of management is one thing I get a lot of good feedback regarding as well.

The flexibility is also important. We still have a lot of customers that have a use case for non-flash, yet you can also build the flash version as well.

I would love to see more compatibility between the different platforms within Dell EMC's portfolio.

Stability is great. It has been very rock solid.

Now that they can do the controller upgrades, it's really helped them out a lot, and it'll help to be able to scale more. They're not just trapped into one model and, instead of having to do a lift and shift of all the data, they can now do head upgrades.

The support is still going through its growing pains right now, with the merger of the two organizations.

I rate it an eight out of 10. It's very frustrating that it's not backward-compatible with the previous platforms, so it's a struggle for a lot of our customers. We can overcome it, but it's a hard conversation to have with them sometimes.

Go in open-minded. If you're used to the old VNX platforms you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Our primary use case is branch office. It has performed adequately well.

Performance is the key factor within the branch offices and this platform, because it is a small form factor, definitely helps address our power-space constraint problems, within this facility. It also provides overall performance improvement of our business applications which are critical to our regional offices.

• Quick Snapshots
• Cloning, which we need in our environment
• It's all-flash array, Unity 450F
• It has performed adequately well for our business needs

There is nothing needed at this time.

It's very stable. The current firmware version we're on is the latest and greatest, so we've been pretty happy with the overall performance and availability of the platform.

Again, it's a branch office, small, so there's no need to scale it, we haven't crossed that path yet. This is our first implementation of Unity within our environment, we are primarily a VMAX shop, so our venture into the mid-range arrays was something that was brought on because we needed better performance within our regional offices.

Based upon my experience working with previous EMC platforms, the GUI is a vast improvement over the previous GUI's, the elimination of Java, the use of HTML5 was a substantial improvement, and the ease of use of the GUI made it very, very intuitive for my team and myself.

Here, we were using local Dell servers with local, attached storage, and we needed something that could provide a high level of availability for our customers in the branch, and that also fit into a small cabinet within our closet. The solution presented itself as a viable platform for what we needed in our space. The whole goal - high-availability, capacity, performance - all three were met by the Unity 450F storage platform.

It was straightforward to a point. There were some minor hiccups with the registration piece. It's something I shared with my account team, but overall, once we got past those hurdles, everything else was a simple install, configure. 

When selecting a vendor, support is the key thing.

Do your research. There are a lot of vendors out there but if you're looking for performance, price-point, ease of use, I recommend looking at Unity as a platform. It's a great platform, for mid-range businesses.

It's our production SAN. In terms of performance, I've had a few issues, a lot of error messages that they haven't been able to figure out yet. 

I do like to be able, in a DR scenario, to use it to failover if we have to. That was our original use case, but we've actually gotten away from that for now, because it was just too cumbersome to do a failover, a data center failover, using Unity.

We can get to our applications faster. That's the biggest plus that we've seen with it. 

The reason we purchased it was for dual data centers. We have one in each data center so that we can have that redundancy, that failover if needed. 

Obviously, flash, everything's quicker. We did notice a lot of speed difference.

We actually started out with XtremIO, and we were running our SQL servers off XtremIO, but our application servers couldn't keep up. So now, our application servers are all on flash, SQL Servers are all on XtremIO, and the two work together well.

One of the issues we've had is that controllers have crashed several times. Just today I received a message that a dump file was detected. We've had a lot of problems with the storage processor, SPBs. We've actually had them crash. Luckily, nothing went down.

We purchased big enough that we haven't had to worry about scalability yet.

Tech support is knowledgeable. We get the answers when we need them, they get us back up.

Originally we had the EMC VNX, and support was up on it. So it was either going to be: buy support for the VNX or move to Unity. The money came out the same, so our decision was to move to Unity.

I would rate the unity at six out of 10 because of the errors that we are receiving.

If I were advising a colleague, right now I'd probably have them move to another solution. There are other flash arrays. They may not have the Dell EMC name, but they are performing just as well at a lower cost point.

General storage for virtual machines. The virtual machines have different roles, essential roles; and, of course, mission-critical servers running financial services, or engineering programs, etc.

I have a client that jumped from the stone age to hybrid. They do enjoy the hybrid storage, the fast cache, etc. It has greatly improved their performance, absolutely. The customer is really happy about it.

It is the performance combined with the Gig-per-dollar value. That combination is superior to other storage options.

All the features that the client has, the client has really enjoyed them.

One thing they could do is lower the price point. There are other storage products that are available from Dell, the SE series for example. The client is comparing the Unity and the SE3000 for example, the SE is cheaper.

So far so good. No issues with stability.

I'm sure scalability will be fine. It will be great. But the client has not reached the point of needing to increase the capacity, or other features, yet.

So far technical support is very reliable, it's very good that way. We haven't engaged tech support so far, but when did the deployment we did have Dell EMC come in and provide deployment services, and that went through pretty well.

We picked Dell deployment services, so it was very straightforward. The Dell technician came in on time and then, according to the survey that the client filled out earlier - it was great. The client was impressed.

I give it an eight out of 10 and the two missing points are because of the price tag.

In terms of advice, I would definitely recommend Dell solutions. As for Unity, it depends on the budget. I definitely recommend Unity, because I do have clients that are currently using it, and they don't have any issues, they're happy with the product.

As a partner, we are able to deploy it across multiple industries: healthcare, government, small business. We install Unity everywhere. There is really no one, set, niche customer that we do it for.

• Starting small and being able to grow to a larger scale
• All-flash options are great
• Hybrid options are good for certain use cases

The code revisions. I think that they could do a better job of testing on the back-end, for the code revisions. I've heard of some issues down the line where people have upgraded to the latest code and there were bugs in it, and they had to release a subsequent code fix. More testing on the Dell EMC side, for when they release those code revisions, would be a good idea.

It is stable. I have not personally seen any issues when deploying in a customer environment.

Technical support has gotten worse since the merger, for example, response time to SR creation. And mainly, if I ask for a solution, they'll send me a white paper and say, "Here, just do it, here's a KB article." They seem to be more hands-off, and they just want to let the customer or the partner deal with it.

Another big thing that is somewhat upsetting is that they got rid of partner support, installation support. We really liked that. Being a partner and installing, if we run into issues while on site, with doing any type of work, we don't have a number to call anymore, a direct line. We have to go through the same process, and that process is terrible, still.

Most of the customers that I have are old VNX customers, and they want to replace their VNX with the latest and greatest, so they go to Unity. The Unity is a VNXE but on steroids. That's the main use that I see, just part of a refresh cycle, and they want to refresh with the Unity's.

It's very simple to set up. No issues with the setup.

Nothing is ever a perfect 10 in my book, so I would say this solution is a seven. I think there is room for improvement, there is always going to be room for improvement, especially in IT. Having a perfect 10 in any IT hardware platform, I don't it think that exists right now.

It's a replacement for a VNX, it's faster. It has its good points, and it has its bad points.

I don't think it's providing any great enhancements over the existing platform.

There are some features in VNX that I wish were in the Unity. Storage Groups for isolating LANs and hosts. That is a big issue.

We've also encountered an issue when it comes to migrating to compressed LANs on the Unity, and during the Storage vMotion. It appears that the compression algorithm is overwhelmed, and when it becomes overwhelmed it just stops compressing and writes the raw data to the destination. We later copied internally another Storage vMotion to another compressed LAN and achieved much higher compressions on that internal copy. It would be really nice if there was a way to automatically throttle, as a part of a Storage vMotion, to say, "I want to gain the maximum benefits from the compression algorithm, so throttle back the Storage vMotion to implement 100 percent compression."

My colleague has done most of the migration work, but he's also encountered a few other issues in terms of the integration with vCenter. 

It's a box that has a lot of promise, and it was a very shiny new "sports car" when we got it. It has a few dents and scratches in it. That "new car pride," we don't go out and wash it every weekend now. Some of that reality has kicked in. 

I still have expectations, it's an all-flash array, while our VNX, obviously, is not. So we do anticipate, once we've completed the migration and get more experienced with it and maybe with some code upgrades, improvements to some of the attributes, that it will do a good job for us.

We went from the VNX, where we had about 900 spinning disks, to 27 solid-state disks. There have been no failures in the last year.

It had better scale, it costs a lot of money. I definitely think it will. Also, my hope, being that it is solid-state, is that the ongoing maintenance costs will be reduced, on the off chance that our firm might not want to replace it after five years.

Tech support is good. We've always had our struggles over the years with their support. I characterize their level-one support as being somewhat questionable. But if stuff hits the fan and you have to get up to level two or three, you have a priority-one, they always come through.

We are a titanium partner. We deliver the full solution portfolio that Dell and Dell EMC have.

It can be simple to deploy, the standup time is quite quick. The interface is quite quick. The terms are simple, intuitive, it's similar what was there in the VNXE before it. It's very simple to navigate and administer from the console. 

The hardware itself, it differs from Compellent and differs from the VNX before it. It doesn't have a separate file harbor that goes with it, there are no separate NAS heads. It's 2U, you have file and block storage, so you get a quite a lot of services for a small footprint.

It's not as reliable as it should be, I think it was probably released a little early. We've had production problems with customers, and there are still some challenges at scale as well.

Compression is a problem for the system. Once you enable dedupe and compression, the performance of the system, the capability, halves. Customers don't necessarily realize that, and they can't get as much out of the system as they initially thought. It has to be right-sized and sized for compression, but even with that, because there are only two storage processors, you're ending up at almost 40 percent usage.

Tech support has taken a downturn since the acquisition, and that's not just for the Unity. The skill, the people, the engineers, some of them have been let go. Their talent has been let go, so the overall support is another challenge we're dealing with on an ongoing basis.

It's quite easy to deploy, there is no problem there. The system itself is good as well, the offering is good. You can have file and block without any extra harbor for file.

I would like to see the new system come out very quickly - that merges Compellent and Unity - and let's get rid of these problems and focus the engineering group on one system. To me, that's the quickest route to success. They need to get off the pot for one of them and take the good. Don't necessarily discard the code. There are some good features in both, so they really need to get back to an engineering focus, like EMC of old.

I would give the Unity a five out of 10. The offering is good. The simple console is good. The deployment is good. Support is not good. The compression performance capability is not good. Problems with I/O modules, with bugs that came out that really should have been caught before the product was released. And I have a problem with the confusion in the market between the two systems, between Compellent and Unity. The quicker a mid-range solution comes out combining the two products, the better.

The biggest improvement is the data reduction for the organization. That is where they see the better TCO and improved ROI for their existing footprint. That's the biggest advantage for the businesses that are using the Unity platform.

The features that customers are looking for, because I do a lot of architecture work, is the management simplicity. The provisioning is very simple in the Unity platform, as well as the reporting structure back to the customer. They get to know end-to-end visibility in the system environment.

Inline dedup compression security is coming up as an issue, encryption is key for our customers. If we could have more ways to do software-based encryption, those are the features customers are asking us for, as well as replication.

The maturity level of the Unity is getting better and better as we speak. The latest and greatest cores are becoming more stable than the previous one. EMC is doing a lot of investment in research and development. They're getting better and better.

It is scalable. Customers are going more into distributed architecture, so the Unity definitely  has a scalable architecture built into that. Scale-out architecture, scale-up architecture.

There is a lot of room for improvement on the support side, because of the response time. I'm giving the customer feedback. Customers are coming to me as their architect, as a level-1, level-2, they're asking me. The response from the EMC is not there yet. We are sending the same feedback back to EMC, to improve the support line.

We started with the VNX platform. I have a very good understanding of the EMC portfolio from Centera, from NS, VNX, VNXE, and then VMAX.

Setup is very easy. Absolutely. It's easy to build the environment. That has improved a lot.

At the end of the day, the licensing cost is key, because every customer has a pain point, that the cost of each piece is high. So if we can bundle everything in a package, that is how the competitors are selling their footprint. For example, Pure, if you buy a box, everything comes with the box. So, in a similar fashion, if we can do anything along those lines, it will be better for the customer.

I give it an eight out of 10, because there is definitely room for improvement, for EMC to invest in it.