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pros and cons of Dell EMC Unity Storage system
January 12, 2019

pros and cons of Dell EMC Unity Storage system

Timothy Sawah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Dell EMC Unity

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
  • 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
UNITY integrates better with VMware compared to IBM Storwize and HP StorageWorks. In terms of performance, the three systems deliver almost similar performance. In terms of cost, Netapp are cheaper, whereas the IBM and HP solutions are more expensive. Based on the gartner matrix, Dell EMC storage systems remain the leader in the storage market.
The UNITY storage system is perfect for medium-size enterprises. The auto-tiering feature can boost performance for commonly used apps while moving less utilized apps disks to cheaper storage arrays. This said, UNITY suits best an enterprise with a mix of heavily used and rarely used applications. On the other hand, enterprises with applications requiring heavy access are recommended to get the more expensive all-flash storage systems.