Dell EMC Unity XT – Full Review

Storage Review (www.storagereview.com) have a fantastic review of the Dell EMC Unity XT, with a 13 min video which I’ve included below. I’m a big fan of Storage Review – very professional, quality content and I recommend anyone selling storage to sign up to their emails.

The review focuses on the Unity XT 480F all-flash model highlighting the performance and manageability. Which, for most customers, are the two items at the top of the shopping list when buying all-flash. Unity XT also ships in hybrid models with drives ranging from 800GB to 15TB in the 25 hot-plug drive bays. Expansion beyond the standard bays comes from drives shelves using the same 2U 25-bay form factor, or a huge 80-bay enclosure.

Dell EMC position the Unity XT as a mid-range To put this into context, the Unity XT 480F can expand up to 750 drives for 4PB capacity, delivering 1.68M IOP’s. This particular system is broadly in the middle of the Unity XT all-flash range, flanked either side by the Unity XT 380F and Unity XT 880F (1,500 drives/16PB/2.5M IOPs). This is a step change from the previous generation Unity, driven primarily by a move to the newer Intel Skylake processors and significant code rewrites in the EMC software. There are also changes to the IO system which allows for an early life upgrade to NVME drives later this year.

As you’d expect, there are numerous options for configuring the IO modules in a Unity XT. Customers needing maximum performance will opt for the 16 FC (8 per IO module), but there is also a 25Gb option alongside the default four 10Gb ports for customers that have standardised on iSCSI.

For anyone wanting to see how the Dell EMC Unity XT is setup, the review shows a top-level view of how the Unity XT’s Unisphere software is used to configure and manage the available storage. Any customers using VMware will appreciate the run through of provisioning a VMFS datastore.