Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

It's used for general storage or backup storage throughout the environment.

Inline data reduction is pretty impressive.

The user interface could be improved. The Dell Compellent user interface is fantastic, but the Unity user interface is, in comparison, pretty lousy. It's functional, and I can do what I need, but the Dell Compellent user interface is so much more intuitive and user-friendly.

I wish that the product had some more flexibility. It seems it's purposely designed to not have a lot of flexibility, and as a customer, I don't appreciate it.

I have been using this solution for three years or so.

I've had some unexpected quirkiness, but for the most part, it's pretty good. Its stability is an eight out of ten.

As long as you're buying the right product, it's probably an eight out of ten in terms of scalability. What you don't want to do is get locked into something you don't want. If you want a hybrid, such as a spinning disk in a solid state, you have to know that upfront. That's because some of the models restrict to only SSD. Later on or down the road, if you want the spinning disk for cold storage, it doesn't happen. You can't convert it. You have to get a different array or something else.

Their technical support can be very good. It depends on who you get, but that's how it's with any support organization. The individual makes a difference, but generally, their support has been pretty good. The only thing that I don't like is that you sometimes have to wait to get to a support engineer, but they've gotten better at that.

I would rate it a seven out of ten in terms of the ease of the setup.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

We propose this solution when customers need to expand their workload or storage.

It is great because it can work as a SAN and net storage.

It is expensive, and the pricing could be better.

We have been using this solution for three years, and most companies in Egypt partner with Dell EMC. It is the main storage solution that we sell to customers. It is deployed on-premises.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the scalability a nine out of ten, and we have more than 80 customers in Egypt.

There is a good ROI if the customer has critical applications and file storage.

The licensing is included in the appliance, and I rate the licensing costs an eight out of ten.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten and recommend it to others.

Dell Unity XT is used for almost all types of mid-range requirements, such as databases, virtualization, file services, and other applications, for example, exchange servers.

Dell Unity XT has unified storage which provides both blocks, and file protocols, which helps to get rid of separate storage for each purpose.

The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is its support of protocols for both block, and file levels. It has the features a store solution should have.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for approximately five years.

The stability of Dell Unity XT is great. We have not received any complaints about errors or failures in deployments.

We have more than 10 customers using Dell Unity XT. We are focusing on Dell PowerStore more because it is a newer product. We would like to convert our customers from Dell Unity XT to Dell PowerStore.

The scalability of Dell Unity XT is very good.

I rate the scalability of Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

I rate technical support from Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

Positive

Dell Unity XT is straightforward to set up.

One person can handle the configuration and deployment, but a helper is needed for rack mounting and cabling.

The features of Dell Unity XT allow support of both block-level and file-level protocols and provides a good return on investment because customers don't need to purchase separate storage systems for each protocol.

The pricing of Dell Unity XT is good.

I rate the price of Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

If a customer is considering implementing Dell Unity XT, I would advise them to also purchase the implementation from professionals to receive the best results.

I rate Dell Unity XT an eight out of ten.

Dell Unity XT is used via iSCSI as a storage system for our infrastructure.

The most valuable features of Dell Unity XT are the data compression for all of our VMs up to four times and the performance is good.

The price of Dell Unity XT could improve.

I have been using Dell Unity XT for approximately one year.

Dell Unity XT is a stable solution.

The scalability of Dell Unity XT is good, it can scale well.

We have many VMs that are using the solution. We have plans to increase the usage of the solution.

I have not used the support from Dell Unity XT.

We used other Dell solutions prior to Dell Unity XT and we use Synology for more simple projects.

The initial setup of Dell Unity XT is straightforward.

We did the deployment of Dell Unity XT in-house. We have three engineers that do the maintenance and support of the solution.

The price of Dell Unity XT could improve. However, it is a one-time purchase.

I rate Dell Unity XT a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for customers who are looking for a cost-effective option that provides an end-to-end solution for servers, backups, and storage.

The unified storage feature is valuable because it means my customers don't require the setup of a separate mass. They can use the existing storage system as a mass.

Using this solution has meant that I do not need to look for different partners to provide me with solutions like a backup service. Dell provides end-to-end solutions.

This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for. 

I have a limited budget for IT solutions so it would be great to provide Dell's solutions at a lower cost. 

I have been using this solution for five years. 

This is a scalable solution. 

I would rate the customer service for this solution an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I have previously used HPE. HPE only offers hardware and so we needed to find a cloud-based solution. 

From a pricing perspective, this solution is comparable to others on the market. 

This solution requires regular maintenance from a dedicated team. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

What I found most valuable from Dell EMC Unity XT is its easy management through its multi-cloud support. They also offer remote support or secure remote services, which I also find valuable. The support they provide their users is very good, and they'll really help whenever you need support.

I've been working with Dell EMC Unity XT for six years.

This product is stable on production.

Dell EMC Unity XT has some scalability issues which they need to address.

Before you can get support for Dell EMC Unity XT and other Dell EMC products, you have to spend time looking for the service tag number on your product, and this is a process that makes it difficult to access support, but once you gain access, they'll provide you with very good support.

The initial setup for this product was easy and didn't involve any complexity.

Dell EMC Unity XT is being used both in our company and the companies of our customers. We work with our customers, though I'm moving to another company, but I'm still integrating this product, e.g. it's being used in-house.

There is some dependency on the storage side.

We only have two people in the company working on this product.

The price for Dell EMC Unity XT being higher or lower depends on the partner negotiations.

I'm giving Dell EMC Unity XT a rating of 10 out of 10. It's stable and it's a very innovative product.

We used Dell EMC Unity XT for onsite storage.

We were moving from our HP3 power data center to a hybrid cloud solution. We still needed some onsite storage, but we wanted faster performance and a more efficient capacity. The flash storage generally outclasses older solutions, which was why we went down the flash storage route.

Having gone down the flash storage route, we liked Dell EMC Unity XT because of its speed and efficiency. We did compare it with Pure, but we liked Dell because Pure is more niche, while Dell EMC Unity XT is more general purpose. We can also buy other things from Dell, and we get better prices from them, compared to Pure. In Pure, you can only buy storage. These are the things we liked about this product.

Dell operates at the commodity end of the market, so if they really want to get into storage in a big way, they need to have better pre-sales technical support and engagement.

They do what they say, but if it was a really big implementation, I would be worried about recommending Dell EMC Unity XT, simply because we need to have a more technical understanding of it. The technical engagement can be a lot better.

Dell EMC Unity XT is a stable product.

Dell EMC Unity XT has good scalability.

The technical support for this product is fine.

There is an annual charge for the license of this product. It has better pricing than its competitor: Pure Storage.

We evaluated Pure Storage.

I'm in IT and my niche is digital transformation consulting. One of my customers needed a storage solution, so I recommended Dell EMC Unity XT. I'm not a storage consultant. I'm a digital transformation consultant, and one of my clients needed a storage solution.

I'm not a user of this product. My clients might need a solution from time to time, and what I do is I recommend solutions.

Dell EMC Unity XT is a good product.

I didn't get involved in the initial setup of this product, but I believe it was straightforward. It only took one to two days for the installation, then we were able to migrate our data.

I can recommend this product to others looking into implementing it.

I'm giving Dell EMC Unity XT a score of seven out of ten.

Unity is our central storage solution. All of our data is stored on this platform, so it's not just production servers in DR. We have two DR—near and far—so there are three sites in total. Unity holds all of our transactional data.

My storage team likes Unity's replication features. Three-site replication is a unique feature that EMC offers us.

We've been using Unity storage for almost 10 years.

Unity is very stable. 

Unity is scalable. 

I would rate Dell EMC support seven out of 10. We had to follow up a lot. We sent an email beforehand, so they knew the model and everything about our environment. We expected them to do better homework and engage with my team. If they had done the implementation like that we could have saved a lot of time. That is why I rate them seven and not nine or eight.

Implementing Unity isn't straightforward, but it's not that complex, either. There is still some room to expedite the implementation process a bit. We had support from EMC guys in India or Singapore. They worked with our bank's in-house storage team, which has about four members. 

Our contract included training, and we had to pay for that also. It was supposed to be on site, where our team visited EMC somewhere in India or Singapore to get training, but we couldn't do that because of the pandemic, so the training was online. If we get trained next time, we would like to do most of the implementation by ourselves.

We have a perpetual license for Unity and a support contract with Dell EMC. 

I rate Dell EMC Unity XT eight out of 10. We compared Unity with NetApp and HP also. In some areas, NetApp and HP have advantages over EMC. I think NetApp holds the top Gartner position. It's in the upper-right quadrant. 

Also, Dell EMC doesn't have a presence in Bangladesh, so they work through local partners. Previously, they had only one partner with sub-partners or sub-agents. This complicated the relationship with the end customer. We had been working with the same partner for the last eight years, but when we were upgrading, they told us they could no longer support us because they had some issues with EMC. We got caught in the feud between Dell EMC and their partner.

We had to get somebody else appointed as a new partner and then discontinue the earlier partner's agreement to make it commercially feasible. I think EMC should be more careful in appointing partners, and they need to have better control over their partners. And if their partner has some problems with them, we should not suffer.