Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

The VNX5300 was a good all-around device, which we used for our VMware-based workloads along with CIFS-based file access. After our transition to HCI, we needed a dedicated, non-virtual machine-based CIFS solution that was easily scalable to fit our needs. The Unity 300 fit that and has not caused any issues since being in production.

We currently deploy the Unitys for CIFS-based file access to supplement our VxRail deployment, which was installed around the same time.

I would like the device to have the ability to pull down its own firmware. That would be a great thing.

We have had no stability issues with the product, including when adding replication on the fly, customer installed code updates, and customer installed DAEs.

We have had no issues of scalability with the product. The product has been upgraded with additional drives and enclosures multiple times without incident.

All of our servers are Dell EMC servers. We have it integrated with SharePoint and all of our applications.

It's been a great infrastructure to build upon.

For me, the best thing is the reliability. Even some of ours that are somewhat old or out of warranty have a very solid, excellent reliability.

I love the systems management of the servers. It's easy to set up, easy to monitor.

Excellent stability. A lot of ours are older, even past what would be considered end-of-life, but they still have a very low failure rate.

Scalability is good. We use some Dell EMC blade servers, so it's easy to add another blade server without a lot of cabling or setup.

Good tech support. We can usually get a parts dispatch without too much fuss.

The initial setup was easy.

The pricing is right in line with competitors.

I always recommend Dell EMC servers in general, as far as their reliability goes and the management software built in.

I rate it at nine out of ten. Overall, we're very happy with the product. It's not perfect, there are little bits of improvement that could be made to things that we use such as Dell EMC OpenManage Essentials, minor things. It's good, just not perfect.

For Unity, our use case is mostly test and dev.

Compared to older generations of arrays there is quite an improvement, compared to the older VNXs, for example. It depends on you use it, but for our purposes, we find Unity simple to use.

It's simple, easy to manage.

At the moment, we are pretty satisfied with it. Perhaps the user interface could be better.

It's more stable than the old generation of arrays. We had a lot of issues with the VNX, for example, but they got better over time. The VNX2 was better, and the Unity has been even more stable.

For our use cases, I believe it will meet our needs moving forward.

Tech support is very good. We haven't had many of serious issues, and the issues we have had have been dealt with very well.

The setup was straightforward. We set most of the configuration ourselves. If you have basic knowledge then it's pretty straightforward.

We did compare it to others at the time, but they have a wide selection of tools and products to meet our use cases. Good support as well.

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.

• Use Replication function to build up cold or warm Disaster Recovery (DR) site.
• Use Auto-Tier and FAST VP to build up flexible space.

• Performance dashboard
• Because I always need to trouble shooting for IOPS & database (DB) performance issues. I can quickly focus on what is part of the issue. I can decrease downtime and can plan next year's extended capacity budget.
• Integration of the VPLEX function for Cross IDC structure.

For the integration of the VPLEX function for Cross IDC structure, they should integrate the function into the SP controller.

Yes, sometimes the DNS does not work out properly.

No, there have not been issues with the scalability.

We use it for virtualization. We have integrated it with Exchange and VMware vSphere.

This is actually part of a delivered solution. We have a VCV block, into which the Unity is embedded. The Unity is one of three components. We've got compute and networking in there. The overall product, with Unity being a component, is fine. And individual Vblocks are fine, but the stretched vCenter that we have was complex. Their product is called VPLEX and it was expensive.

It performs as expected.

• Stability
• Interoperability with the other components of the system

I would like to see better automation of upgrades, more seemless upgrades.

It's very stable.

It's fairly scalable. We went through a scale-up and it performed as expected.

The initial setup was moderately complex.

Hitachi.

If it's a value for your company then I'd recommend it. For us, it was expensive, but it was of value to us.

However, I wouldn't go through that again. We are targeting hyperconverged now, as opposed to converged. It was a bit overwhelming. From the VCE perspective, the individual Vblocks were very well executed, but they didn't seem to know the VPLEX product very well, and that was nail-biting.

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.

We use this solution mainly with our clients in the education sector, in order to consolidate their data into a single, unified storage setup.

This solution has allowed us a high level of visualizations.

We particularly like the user interface on cloud IQ with this product.

We would like to see more advanced integration capability added to this solution.

We have been using this solution for the last six months.

We have found this solution to be quite stable.

We have had no problems scaling up this solution.

The setup of this solution is very user-friendly and, as long as the prerequisites are met, then deployment should not take more than two to three days.

Before setting up this solution we would advise that organizations prepare the physical equipment that will be required for on-premises deployment, as well as gathering information on the data to be migrated.

This will allow for an average deployment time of one to two days.

We would rate this solution a nine out of ten.