Dell EMC Unity XT reviews

We use this solution for remote sites with greater than 20TB & less than 100TB in block storage requirements. We utilize Dell EMC Unity 350f for ESX hosts and some CIFS & NFS NAS needs. We also use these arrays for DR needs to help control cost for primary block storage needs.

The Unity Arrays are easy to deploy and maintain. The All-Flash models are intuitive and easy to work with, in addition to providing high IOPS with low latency to support Business Critical applications. Because of the newer features and performance, it's easy to maintain and support remotely.

The All-Flash models are pretty fast for the vast majority of our remote workloads.
Encryption (data at rest - DAR) is easy to implement and has very little performance overhead.

CloudIQ SaaS is also a nice touch and is available for free. You can remotely monitor the health and performance of the arrays online or via a mobile app.

We would like to see the concept of Storage Groups brought back to this product line. Manually assigning new LUNs & removing LUNs at sites with a few ESX hosts in a cluster is fairly easy and straightforward, but when you have large clusters with twenty to thirty hosts, this becomes a burden.  Because of this, we have limited the use of Unity systems in our larger data centers.

Between two and three years.

It is for a customer who does virtualization.

We use replication for disaster recovery (DR), making our DR process much easier.

Price and performance are its most valuable features.

It streamlines processes.

I haven't seen the roadmap for this solution.

It has met our overall performance expectations. The solution runs as we need it to, without any issues. It hasn't failed.

We haven't tried scaling yet.

The technical support is good.

We had performance issues with our previous product, which is why we started to search for a new solution when we did a reorganization. We decided on this solution because of the performance that we receive from the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward: Just connect, plug in everything, then do the configuration wizard.

We are integrators.

Our CAPEX was close to $42,000 and operating costs are below $1000.

We also evaluated HPE and Lenovo.

The product has met all our expectations.

Take a closer look at the price per gigabyte and the performance that you are getting with the solution.

The primary use case is storage.

The solution helps us be more competitive in the market against our competitors.

We use replication.

It has reduced complexity.

It is missing some features, like deduplication.

It is pretty stable.

It can scale.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup has straightforward and complex pieces, such as, the integration. 

We have seen ROI

We don't use the cloud options.

This was for our SAN storage. Pretty much everything runs on this: databases, servers, etc.

We have resolved IT challenges with this solution. It sped up our environment. We went from spinning disk to all-flash, which reduced our footprint.

The software is very easy to use.

• Space
• Ease of use
• Snapshots
• Replication between sites
• It is very seamless.

We would like to see the synchronous replication process included in the next release. Not having this downgraded our performance by 65 percent. This really needs to be improved.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

The technical support is really good. I can open up a chat support session with them, then they can either resolve it or turn it into a ticket.

We previously had the VNX5700, which was seven years old. It was at end-of-life, and we had maxed out its capacity.

The initial setup was straightforward for the most part. Because we can do synchronous replication between the two sites, this made the setup challenging for this piece. They did not know how to set this up initially. We ended up having to do bidirectional synchronous replication. 

We used Data Blue (previously LPS), as our integrator, to do the installation for our deployment. They worked with our onsite Dell EMC representatives.

Our costs are roughly $200,000 a year.

We narrowed it down to Hitachi and Dell EMC. We put it out to bid and Dell EMC won.

Overall, it is good product.

If you are doing asynchronous replication, this is a great solution. If you are looking for a synchronous replication solution, I would recommend PowerMax.

The primary use case is NAS.

We use it for its quality and NAS.

It has good performance.

The solution is extremely functional for the price that we pay for it. It is worth the investment.

The application's administration needs improvement and become better. It previously was better.

It is not stable enough.

Dell EMC has good technical support. We haven't had to use it for this product, but we have use it for other products and not had any problems.

The initial setup and migration were straightforward.

The cost of it is good for us.

We purchased a five-year warranty.

We picked Unity, as it is a mature, established solution.

Research the other products that Dell EMC offers, as there is a wide variety.

Our primary use case is for our data center and hypervisor cluster.

We can get almost real-time response times.

We are just getting ready to leverage Cloud Tier.

Deduplication is the biggest thing for our company.

It is easy to use.

Compression is making a difference towards the amount of hardware that we need to purchase.

We love our snapshots and the CloudIQ function is great.

I don't think we are really pushing our Unity, which we have discussed with Dell EMC.

I would like them to continue to build on the solution and expand on the functionality, like replication.

Our hypervisor cluster has 13 nodes. We have some file level and front-end services.

We leverage the iSCSI and Fibre Channel functionalities for scalability.

Dell EMC technical support is pretty quick.

We use it for both file and block in a converged system, supporting a VMware environment and virtualization. VMware is the primary use case.

We have deployed it at remote locations; in a converged platform it really helps. We don't have to have two different storage system which helps to minimize the footprint.

It is a platform that we have standardized on for remote sites which enables us to have engineers and admins who are trained on and knowledgeable about the platform across the board. That enables them to support those sites, which is super-beneficial for us because we can do more with less.

The ability to mix and match SSDs with flash, and spinning disk in there as well, really allows us to meet our performance requirements.

Overall, the most valuable thing for our use case is the flexibility to have multiple-protocol support.

We'd like to see a cheaper version of an all-flash array in that footprint.

It's very stable. We haven't had any major issues with downtime.

It scales very well. It's built into the model line which allows you to scale as necessary. You can choose the model you need to scale with your needs.

Dell EMC's tech support is awesome. We've used both onsite help and remote phone support and I have nothing but great things to say about them.

The setup was really straightforward. We have a long history of using the Dell EMC product line so we are very familiar with the platforms and how they work. This was just the next evolution.

I give the solution an eight out of ten because it meets our use case very well. But it's an eight because nothing is perfect. There is always room for improvement, whether that be in the UI or something else.

We are using it mostly for VMware and Wintel. It is also for applications, like SQL, which need to be used on multiple different operating system, such as Windows, Linux, and sometimes Citrix. We use it with virtualized infrastructure.

We use QoS and snapshots features, which I like.

Unity provides a complete storage solution for VMware on a Wintel Windows box for various applications, such as SQL or Patron Databases. It is seamless, and it sits there providing all the storage and connectivity, so we can forget about it. Unity takes care of itself, solving all the basic needs of a robust infrastructure.

It is easy to deploy. That is the best feature that I like, because I used to fly into locations to install a Unity. We used to have an expense of $5,000 on the product. Now, I just send whomever is onsite over there locally with the initialization information in a text file. Then, they can put it in a USB drive, come back, and it's deployed. Afterwards, I can remotely access it, saving us $5,000 every time. It is not very expensive, so the value added is you get big bang for your buck.

If I can connect to my Unity through my iPad or my cellphone to check everything is okay and view the information via a dashboard. 

I would like to have secure mobile connectivity going forward. This would help me be more proactive.

It is pretty stable. I like the stability, because everything works like it should. We made it all redundant. So, we don't have anything to worry about.

We are so virtual that we have two of us managing the whole infrastructure. Everything is taken care of and highly available. Nothing is vulnerable at all. Everything is good. There have been no issues at all, so far.

We have 30 to 40 Unities out there in the field. We don't even scratch the full capabilities of the Unity. We are at about 20 to 30 percent utilization. It is just provisioned so well that we are sitting at 90 percent performance level. We have it well-provisioned so we don't need to worry about performance for the next five years.

It is quite scalable. If you want to add on, you can add on easily. We have a 25-slot enclosure and are probably at 15 right now. If we purchase a big company, need to scale up, we can easily scale up. 

If there's any issues with a hard drive or any other hardware components, Dell EMC is contacted, then they will call us back to schedule to get into the data center to replace something. This is all virtual. Support is not a problem, because it's automatically taken care of. Only thing we have to do is to give them access to the data center to go do what they need to do to fix it proactively.

The local account team and system engineer are the best part of working with Dell EMC.

Everything is becoming virtual. Then, cloud transformation is being considered right now. Everybody is going over there. We want to evaluate everything, and if the cloud solution is good for us, we'll go there. Everything will be in the cloud.