Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

Storage.

I didn't choose this solution. My boss picked the solution. I actually suggested something else from a different vendor. Personally, my opinion of it is there aren't a lot of great features with it.

There are plenty of areas for improvement. 

They can improve on the speed. 

They can improve on the dedupe features, because right now, if you're using certain functionalities, certain criteria, it doesn't dedupe. It's very limited in one sense, while other vendors dedupe on primary, on critical tier-1 data.

You get support, but sometimes you have to sit there and try to fight through tier-1 just to get to tier-2, to get the correct support, to get particular items corrected. Sometimes it's a battle just to fight through support to get the right people. Most of the time, their first-level support is not very technical, so they tend to give you a page number out of their administration guide, which they call their instruction booklet, and they have you read it. I already have the admin guide. I don't need to read it. I need someone to help me because my system is down. I have a production environment that's very critical.

16 months.

It is stable. I give it that. I have had no issues such as where it just decides to take a vacation or drop dead. I've never had that happen. It's pretty stable. 

It is limited to a certain amount of terabytes. We haven't reached that threshold yet. 

As I said above, when you call, their support is a little light on the "tech. Sometimes you get the correct people. Sometimes you don't. I'd give tech support a four out of 10.

Basically, we used the same company's storage. They kind of revamped the same model and gave it a different name. They rebranded it because they supposedly restructured the whole code, redesigned the code. But basically, it's the same model, but rebranded.

I think they advertise that configuring this model takes less than an hour. But we had an integration firm that came in to do the install. It took some four to five hours just to rack it and configure it. I wouldn't say it was too complicated, and I wouldn't say it was extremely quick compared to what they advertise, that, "You can get the box running within an hour."

I personally had other options that I would have liked to explore, but my boss chose this, so I had no choice.

It's basically the same unit as a VNX, as the predecessor, so it was not that much of a change besides a redesign in code. 

My advice would be do your due diligence in research. Ask a lot of questions. If you can go to the vendor - they have these offices where they have lab environments - go there. Check it out. Test it. Look at it. Do everything before you make the purchase, because once you buy it you're stuck with it. There's no money-back guarantee. Once you buy it, you're stuck with it for the next three to five years. You're spending a quarter million dollars all the way to maybe $5 -$6 million. It's not like you go into a retail store, "The shirt doesn't fit. Can I get my money back, or something else?" You can't do that.

They're slow to implement new innovation with their product. They look at other vendors, I'm guessing, use other vendors as a "guinea pig." If another vendor came out with something new and innovative in their product, they would probably sit there, wait three years to see how the market reacts to that special design, the functionality that they implemented. EMC doesn't really innovate. They just sit there and wait for other people to innovate, and then they just copy.

Their product is stable. That's why people just buy it. Their company is big, and that's why they buy it, because they know EMC has been around for ages. It's one of the very first SAN vendors, since the 1970s. It's that old. It's an ancient company, so people buy for stability.

• FAST Cache: The ability for hot blocks to almost instantaneously be served from Flash.
• FAST VP: Enables us to better utilise the Flash resources that we have.
• ESRS/CloudIQ: Having the array communicating back to Dell EMC enables me to get faster responses to issues which may arise, like a failed disk.

The Unity 400 Hybrid has enable us to better utilise our storage resources and make adjustments dynamically without having to shut down our hosts.

• Inline deduplication would be nice.
• Better management of the hosts in Unisphere.

15 months.

Yes, we had an issue in January with a Service Processor rebooting unexpectedly. Dell EMC resolved this quickly with a special build of the OE and a permanent fix was included in the next public release.

No, the Unity 400 hybrid is highly scalable. It adds extra storage or connectivity can be done while it is online.

10 out of 10. One of the most important criteria in our purchasing decisions is the technical support. DELL EMC set the benchmark for us by which all other vendors are compared.

They have always met their stated service levels and have never let us down. They always follow up to make sure everything is OK.

Yes, we had a CX4-480, which had reached the end of its service life.

The setup was extremely straightforward, As long as you follow the initial config guide, your first LUNs can be available in a couple of hours.

Dell EMC is very competitive on its storage pricing, and from our experience, is not only the superior solution, but the best priced.

Yes, we also looked at IBM and NetApp.

The Unity 400 is one of the easiest to manage and the most reliable storage systems that I have managed in my 22 years in IT. Performance-wise it has met or exceeded all our expectations. If you do run into a problem, the support is second to none.

The storage solution has all our data from all systems, including our new ERP; the whole organization depends on the storage to work. All data is in one location.

Real Unified Storage (Block, File, VVols) in a unique 2U hardware. 

LUN mask. The Host LUN ID is sequential by access in the hosts. When one LUN needs access by many hosts (for cluster purposes), in some cases the Host LUN ID remains different on each host. Storage groups or global IDs for LUNs could be a good solution for this.

No stablility issues.

No scalability issues.

Very good.

The initial setup was very simple.

The licensing process is very simple and it has many features. I can't talk about pricing because I'm in a technical position and I do not have access to costs.

Yes, we still have a VNX5400 (block), before it was at a production storage site, today it is at a disaster recovery site. The change from VNX to Unity was because of the build of the DR site, a new ERP implementation, and to update the storage technology.

Other storage solutions need additional hardware to support file storage and the integration sometimes fails; or they offer fewer features.

We were EMC partners for some time, now Dell EMC partners. Our choices are based in Dell EMC products because we understand that the EMC technology is better when it comes to storage solutions. Among the EMC storage options, the Unity is the best choice when we analyze price, scalability, performance and  features.

The Dell EMC Unity is a small but powerful storage solution. With the "unified" concept it is possible get many features for less.

Replication: Disaster Recovery (DR) plans, RPO and RTO. Replication and ease of storage setup for block LUN’s and VMware.

Same answer as most valuable features.

GUI updates. I had several hours helping support troubleshoot the difference in what the system was doing compared to what the GUI said.

Less than a year.

Sure did.

No.

• Auto-tiering
• FAST Cache

Automatically, the cool data downgrades to slower disks and no human needs to intervene. The FAST Cache helps to have a large quantity of data in memory and speed up the presentation of new storage.

• We spend less time checking the solution.
• The presentation of new storage to the servers is very easy.

The reports could possibly export all the data at once.

10 months.

No issues.

No issues.

Low.

Yes, we previously used EMC VNX. We switched to upgrade.

The initial setup was very easy and intuitive.

It is a good value given the benefits it provides.

Yes, HPE 3PAR.

• The performance
• Ease of use

Before the product went in, we did not have any centralized storage. All our service storage was supported separately. We had multiple machines which added administration and maintenance costs. Whereas now, it is a single source of knowledge and repository for all our data. It has made our lives a lot easier. It also has improved our disaster recovery because we have two of them in place replicating. 

• The virtual appliance is limited to 4TB in storage. This should be unlimited for paying customers.
• The front panel is too fiddly to take off and on.
• The support model would be better within Australia. Support has been great, but onshore support would be minorly beneficial.
• Troubleshooting LUN replication can be difficult.
• When making changes to replicated LUNs (Async in our case), perhaps some measures to prevent us making mistakes. (One of our engineers modified the block storage size and it did not follow the proper procedure, and this broke the replication awkwardly. This was the subject of our most recent support ticket.)

We started using it last November, so going on just about 12 months.

No issues. A very stable product. In previous roles, I have also used the earlier models. The VNX Series and EMC do a really good job. 

No issues. It has been a year, and at the moment, I am having a schedule of work put together to increase the capacity. It will be a very easy job. A matter of adding extra disks to existing slots. Very easy to do. So, a very scalable product.

I have not personally worked with the tech support, but the engineers who installed it have worked with EMC's support. It has been very good. EMC has at times reached out to us, flagging that they have noticed a problem with some of the array configurations. That level of support has been very good. 

No, as there was no central storage solution beforehand. We went to market straight away. 

I got professional services in to do the initial installation. If you get the right people to do the installation, they make it a lot easier.

Pay for the training. At least negotiate with EMC to get the training done, because it is a good product and it is even better once you are shown how to use it properly.

I was debating between the Unity 300 and a NetApp Solution. We ended up picking the Unity only because the administration is a lot easier. 

Also, I had used the earlier model in the past, and it was recommended by the supplier as well. 

It is absolutely a good solution. It does have the ability for expansion into Cloud services, which I would like to use one day, but we have not tried that yet.

• 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.

The ease of use, which makes it very good.

We use it to backup our storage, and also positioning LANs by using the file option, then the block. It is very easy and convenient.

The payment account area.

For approximately a year.

At the moment, there are no issues.

We once had an issue where one LAN was full, and because it was full it was making the SP reboot. But with the upgrade, we decide it was a non-issue, and with the upgrade, it was fixed. The upgrade fixed it.

There are no issues with the scalability.

They have been helpful and knowledgeable.

We used DNX, but we needed to buy something for the backup solution. That is why we went for Unity.

The initial setup is simple, okay, and easy.

The pricing is fine and licensing is okay.

Yes, we looked at Hitachi.

We are partners with this vendor.