Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

All of the IT devices help production time. They make time "faster." But this device, in general, it is a money maker. It makes us a lot of money. That is what I like most about it. It is critical to the business.

The Snapshot feature.

Recently, they released products, sometimes without proper testing, it seems. I guess the way the market is going, the way technology is going, they are saying, "Hey, let's get it out there."

It was pretty buggy when we first got it, but they have improved it with some updates. They worked with us and addressed our concerns.

It will definitely meet our needs going forward. With all-flash it should be able to scale. You probably just need one 4U device and you have terabytes of space.

Technical support has dropped off over the years. It is what it is. It is probably a seven or eight out of 10. It is difficult to find the right person. 

It was straightforward. I cabled it up myself and racked it myself. Someone came out to help with the front-end side, the software side. That was it.

I rate it an eight out of 10, only because it started out buggy. Other than that, it has worked well for our company.

Delivers High IOPS, but more important, low latency as this is the most important part for our usage.

• VMware integration, why is pretty self-explanatory, though Nimble offers better VMware integration then EMC does, which is odd given where EMC comes from.
• Veeam Backup integration: Veeam is the defacto standard for backing up of virtual environments.
• Fibre Channel support

I’d say better VMware integration. Currently, EMC relies on an additional VM (virtual machine) for integration with vCenter, whereas Nimble interfaces directly without the need of an additional virtual machine.

Both products are fully HTML5 compliant, which makes me very happy. We have been able to fully eliminate Adobe Flash thanks to this.

Firmware Upgrades in EMC Unity require you to manually download OS and Drive firmware, this should be integrated (Nimble does this). When you order an EMC Unity, you have to specify the block size. This is weird for me and even weirder that you cannot change this afterwards, you should be able to specify per LUN/datastore (Nimble does this as well).

No.

Not yet.

Easy to use. For beginners, it is very interactive.

The company migrated data from an older NetApp storage. The entire environment is virtualized. The amount of fast cache is great for meeting all demands.

All areas, since the entire environment is virtualized. In Brazil, price and native unity migration tools are not very good yet.

Still using.

No, but I found some articles about a code upgrade that solved some issues.

No problem. During installation, I added more disks and this activity ran without problem.

EMC technical support is great. With support, chat works well to talk with someone about any kind of problem. The only problem is some support agents take a lot of time to understand your issue.

I have worked implementing storage for at least 10 years. So yes, I used a huge number of solutions before. In this case, the customer changed because the warranty of his older storage expired.

The implementation went smoothly. The startup tool is very easy to use.

I believe there are other cheaper options, but you are not paying just for the "iron". The support in storage environment is a crucial thing to consider. Also, consider buying more flash disks for fast cache.

HPE 3PAR

Implement views using consistency groups. It is easier to replicate LUNs, take snapshots, etc. Also, you can't use fast cache with SSD storage pools.

I mainly use Unity XT as a unified, hybrid storage system.

The most valuable feature is the fast cache with functionality rewrite. 

Dell could improve Unity XT by adding support for NVMe.

I've been using first EMC Clariion since 2003 and we can say that Unity XT is the last in the generation with significant improvements over time

Unity XT is stable.

Unity XT can be scaled up.

Dell's technical support is at a very high level, though it's not quite as good for organizations outside of Europe.

I previously worked with Fujitsu and IBM and would say Unity XT is very good compared to them.

The initial setup was straightforward - I would rate it five out of five.

There is no capacity license for XT and no additional costs for expansions. I would rate its pricing as four out of five.

I would give Unity XT a rating of nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature that Unity had at that moment was the ability to communicate with the previous family, the Clariion. So, the migration and all the data transfer was really easy.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say the deduplication part, because for large deduplications, you need an extra appliance to do it in order to avoid having problems in performance. I think that could be improved, because everything should be included in the product, not with an appliance from the outside.

I have been dealing with Dell EMC Unity XT for something like 20 years.

The oldest implementation I have done for Unity was about six, seven years ago and it's been working pretty good. No problem so far.

I have had no problem at all. I think this is one of the most important things. It is very good. Maintaining it and deploying updates require very low maintenance. We haven't had problems. We had to replace a couple of disks in all these years, but it was pretty straightforward.

We switched to Unity because of the price, but that was for the migration from IBM to Dell Clariion. And when replacing the Clariion to the Unity, it was an easy migration of the data.

The initial setup was simple. The main problem is that you need an extra appliance outside of the disk - you need extra hardware.

My advice would be the same thing as the Data Domain - it is important that there is good sizing at the beginning. It makes a difference.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Dell EMC Unity XT a 10.

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.

We have certainly received a performance boost by moving to Unity.

We weren't looking at specific features. We needed to the additional storage and the performance.

No issues with stability so far, but it's early days. We have only been using it a few weeks.

It will certainly help us scale bigger. If I look at the footprint, the VNX's was multi-rack. Now, all of a sudden, we're only at a portion of a rack. And, obviously, if we can scale within the same rack - we can certainly see that by the number of hard drives we've had to put in - we can scale a lot more easily.

Support has always been good. Support, service, all of that, has been good. The guys have been knowledgeable, they know what they're doing. No issues.

We were on the VNX before and we needed to do storage upgrades, we ran out of storage. We decided it would be better to refresh the entire architecture. Went to Unity, which obviously gave us the flash storage as well. 

The transition was pretty seamless. There were no issues in the migration. It is early days. We have not yet gotten to the point of looking at advanced features.

When looking at selecting a vendor, it will be reputation, market share. It will be support, the pricing of the product; a roll-up of all of that is what counts at the end of the day.

I give it a 10 out of 10 for now, because we haven't had anything go wrong.

• Storage
• Easy to manage and configure.
• I can easily setup and configure the LUN and host without support.

Alert notification via SMS. If the product could only send alert notification via SMS, it would be much better. This is needed mostly when you are not in the office and have no access to email. Therefore, you could check immediately if there was an issue.

Nine months.

No issues.

No issues.

100%. They are very accommodating, and it is easy to contact them.

This solution is much better than the previous one.

The initial setup is straightforward. All I need to do is to configure the LUN and host.

This device is worth it.

No.

The product is easy to use and configure. The support is also superb.