Likelihood to Recommend Dell EMC Unity is an easy system and very flexible component and very easy to navigate while providing effective services and management of multiple project information management and the data pulling from the supported third-party platform is easy and quick. Excellent reporting features and easy to use and the analytics tools are amazing.
Read full review For a large, robust, well-secured, and stable storage system, TrueNAS is very well suited. Virtual Machine support is great. Shared filesystems (SMB, NFS, iSCSI, WebDav, AFP) are very well implemented. Time machine support is fantastic; security is very granular. Do not try to use it as a replacement for VMWare... (no migration, etc.)
Read full review Pros Enables you to create multiple copies of any database. Data savings feature with compression. Integrity with VMWare, RHEL, Oracle. The best option is a midrange unified storage array in a customer environment. Some models support NMMe. Copy Data Management (iCDM), Data-At-Rest-Encryption (D@RE). Lukas Mizera Information Technology Infrastructure Specialist - Storage Management
Read full review iSCSI Datastores for virtualization. NFS store for unix storage or backups over networking. Very fast performance, sometimes outclassing SSD arrays even in NFS. The ZFS filesystem has given use much greater flexibility. Using their newer servers we could in theory scale to any height of required storage. Read full review Cons Alerting: receiving an alert when an issue occurs. That is good to know. However, if the alert is cleared, or somehow no longer in alarm, no email is received. At times I will receive the email alert on weekends, not knowing if the issue is resolved or not until Monday when I can access the unit. I have learned in most instances, the alert is a false alarm, which could be a problem. The alerting itself is sometimes not clear. For example, it tells me the link is down, we reset the connection, the link is still down, a tech was dispatched, he troubleshot, and finally the alarm cleared. This incident took almost a week. It went back into alarm after he left, then suddenly it cleared on its own. Read full review more graphical interface to admin features like plugins, jails, list are well but a tiles aproach will be better allow bulk upload/download/update to Groups or user accounts from SMB shares. some script language template featured to create/config/change/delete storage pools /dataset or shares . Read full review Likelihood to Renew The software has been amazing. It has saved me a lot of headache in the past few years. Also, it's nice to knowing that if any of our current Synology devices were to die I can have an iSCSI system up and running very shortly. I didn't give a 10 score because I find their support to be rather slow and pedantic. They test many things when the answer is right in front of them. The compute sytem (not storage) we purchased from them came with pcie gen4 nvme's. They didn't work, but rather than believe me about the spec's in the motherboard manual saying the onboard was pcie3 ONLY they shipped me 2 replacements until I showed them an old pcie3 device worked just fine. The part that rather frustrated me was the machine was claimed to have been tested / burnt in. How can this be true if the server won't even boot up into the BIOS?
Read full review Usability Very cumbersome compared to other vendors in the same marketplace.
Read full review The software is fairly straight forward and if you mess up the network interfaces you can login locally at the console and fix any issues that you may have had with VLANS etc denying you network access. There was a little bit of annoying issues when setting up multiple network interface cards. Rather than keeping one interface setup with DHCP, when you add a second one with a new network it disables the first. Which makes it impossible to login again. However if you wait it will revert. I learned after works that you need to set up the network cards and then go back and setup the first one again and THEN test / apply. After that it was pretty good. The summary of the devices is very nice to. You get an accurate snapshot of how well your system is doing as soon as you login
Read full review Support Rating Not only support for Unity, but for any Dell product, whether for companies or for the end consumer. Support is agile, helpful, and always focused on solving the problem. To date, there has been no problem that Dell's support has failed to resolve and help us with.
Read full review The support was responsive for opening cases. However I found solutions to simple problems took far too long. When we had a bad power supply and we had another with the exact same firmware version they should have sent replacement for both. We had to file another case for the other PSU that started dyeing the same week. They also had to do a lot of troubleshooting to replace the fans that were not behaving as they should. I'm not a home user. I know when certain things are failing and the silly hoops the jump through made it frustrating. However, once we finally got the problem identified we had parts shipped out via advance replacement which was nice.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation went well after we got the boot drive working properly. The device was setup exactly as i asked with the hardware except for the boot drive. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 was the boot drive put us back about a week for the part to arrive. I ended up using a personal drive to show them that they were wrong sending use the gen4 drives.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I was instructed to buy these arrays, but I was not given the opportunity to evaluate other arrays. We evaluated other products in the market that competed with Unity and found that the younger array built from scratch had far better features, software, and ease of use. The Unity system has a unique way of storing the data when compared with other systems.
Read full review Having a better, trusted filesystem to build upon makes a huge difference. I want to know that if something I've written is read, it was the thing I wrote. And if it can't be read, I want to know that soon and know how to repair it.
Read full review Return on Investment Less business downtime and reliability is a major business concern. DELL EMC UNITY addresses this concern well and provides robust storage. Investing in UNITY system is less expensive than all-flash storage systems. Managing and provisioning VMware disks became simpler from a single interface in the Vcenter Read full review Using a TruNAS integrated solution has reduced support overhead compared to using custom hardware. Being cheaper than full flash storage arrays, this unit allows for a good balance of speed with its use of SSD-based caching drives. The reliability of the hardware/software integration means I spend less time troubleshooting and more time doing business. Coming from a custom-built solution it is apparent that IX Systems has done some extensive testing. Read full review ScreenShots