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Reviews (1-7 of 7)
February 19, 2020
Dell EMC Unity. A good general purpose array, but there are now better options available.
My organization was using our Dell EMC Unity in production up until a few months ago. It is now used for our proof of concept and test environments. It was used for block storage only, serving VMware environments. Unity is a good hybrid block storage array with a mix of both flash and, HDD and slow disk providing auto-tiering.
- Tiering.
- Integration with vCenter.
- Legacy tech.
- Not as dynamic as other products.
We are using Dell EMC Unity 600F and 500F for the whole organization. 600F is used for the production environment and 500F is used in the DR environment. These storage arrays are mainly used primarily for storage purposes.
- Compression
- Deduplication
- Should be lighter. A smaller footprint would be better.
- More integrated features.
Dell EMC Unity is being used by a division of the organization. The EMC Unity I monitor and maintain is at two of the facilities within that division. EMC Unity is used by all departments. The EMC Unity is the SAN where the departmental data is stored and accessed. Data availability, reliability, and redundancy are critical to our business. Dell Unity delivers.
- Flexibility
- Reliability
- 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.
January 11, 2019
pros and cons of Dell EMC Unity Storage system
Dell EMC Unity is our primary storage system. It is used by the whole enterprise and managed by the IT department. The storage system hosts virtual servers disks, oracle virtual disks, databases and disk mapping to traditional physical servers. The Dell EMC Unity can be attached through fiber links. It is easily configured and managed through a straightforward graphical interface.
- Very reliable arrays with a notification system when a disk fails
- Simple disk provisioning and mapping
- Easy to upgrade the firmware
- Fast access with a relatively cheap storage combination of flash and SATA drives
- integrates with Vmware vcenter
- The NAS part is not capable of auto-fail to the secondary node.
- Monitoring Dashboard has very limited options
- custom reporting capabilities are not possible
We use Dell EMC Unity exclusively for block storage. We have ESXi, Windows, Linux, and AIX hosts attached to this SAN.
- Simple management interface
- Performance has been very good. No issues with latency.
- Management is too simple. It would be nice if there was a mode for more advanced users. This is Unity's biggest weakness in my opinion. For an engineer that has been managing enterprise storage for 10+ years, I feel like the Unity is a step backward. While it is super simple for newer engineers, there are configuration options that I wish were available to me as a more experienced user.
- VMware integrations are somewhat clunky and operations are time-consuming.
Dell EMC Unity is used across the entire organization. It is used as a dedicated SAN as well as a shared customer environment SAN. It is used for hosting applications from basic web server all the way through large database applications.
- Dell EMC Unity has improved on the end user management experience over their older product suites.
- Dell EMC Unity once stood up is reliable and performs to expectations.
- Dell EMC Unity allows for small entry into the the product suite and can grow based on needs.
- Difficult to configure and set up out of the box compared to newer solutions in the market.
- Software and firmware updates are complicated compared to many other new storage players in the market.
- Support with Dell EMC is sometimes very difficult to get an experienced support professional to assist you with certain less often seen issues.
The Dell EMC Unity device currently in use on campus is used by the entirety of our organization. The primary use case of the device is for CIFS based file shares, which are broke up into several named CIF servers, down to the department level. The use of the Dell EMC Unity allows for centralized storage and retention of the organization's intellectual property.
- The Dell EMC Unity has great Active Directory integration, which allows for NTFS based permissions as needed on a device or file share level.
- The Dell EMC Unity has great capabilities for data replication to another Dell EMC Unity devices.
- The Dell EMC Unity has great integration for NDMP based backups.
- I would like for the Dell EMC Unity to have an easier path to navigation for creating and adjusting Windows-based file share permissions.
Dell EMC Unity Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
About Dell EMC Unity
Unity from Dell EMC is a family of all-flash and hybrid flash storage platforms emphasizing value and cost efficiency.
Categories: Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Dell EMC Unity Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |