Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

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.

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.