The best feature of VPLEX storage is its ability to consolidate storage. It also provides the highest RPO and RTOs for replication technology. VPLEX enables application mobility. 

For example, say you are building an application, and you need two cluster servers. The cluster contains two nodes at the same site, so if that location goes down, then your application will go offline. 

To overcome this issue, we establish another node at a separate site that may be within the same city or another part of the world. That is called metro-clustering and geo-clustering. Both nodes have access to the same storage, creating high availability and redundancy.  

In the event of a disaster, your application will be moved to any other node or passed to any available site, and your application can access storage. This is VPLEX's critical feature.

The most valuable feature of Dell VPLEX is its mirroring capabilities. This feature allows for data to be mirrored across two different data centers, so if one center were to crash or fail, the other center could take over and keep everything running smoothly.

The capacity to migrate machines onto VPLEX is great — it's very clean. We can migrate machines and add arrays easily. 

Replication is a good feature of this product. Mobility is also valuable, it enables us to carry out an internal migration of data. VPLEX can be integrated with any kind of back-end storage and with servers in the front end.

Cross datacenter automated failover.

The best part of the solution is the virtualization layer due to the fact that, for all our pain points, during migration, we use the virtualization with VPLEX.

The solution works well. It's very reliable.

The technical support is good.

Based on our requirements, we bought this product for doing online data migrations without data disruption, but we realized that there is a limit to backend storage that can be encapsulate to it. Hence, we ended up spending more money of buying additional VPLEXs to support more backend storage, which in turn came out as an expensive solution for us.

The most valuable feature is deduplication, as we have no duplication in the snapshots.

The review concerns EMC VPLEX product, which can be purchased/used in two different ways :

1) VPLEX Local

2) VPLEX Metro.

VPLEX Local is used to virtualize the storage locally, within the same data center.

With VPLEX Local, one possible use case is to mirror data between two local arrays. In this way if we lose one array then the data is still accessible to production server on the second local array.

With VPLEX Metro the data can be mirrored between two distant arrays, each one installed on a different data center. With this configuration even if we lose an overall data center (disaster condition), then the data is still available on the other site. This is an additional level of data security which permits to face up disaster conditions.

Another use case offered by VPLEX (either Local or Metro configurations) is transparent data migration.

Without VPLEX, the storage migration (or data migration) can be done in two ways:

- Host based : the host manages the data migration, consuming from its own resources (CPU, RAM etc). A downtime can be needed as part of the host based migration.

- Array based: migration is handled by the array, but a downtime has to be scheduled host side to discover the new storage.

With VPLEX we can migrate data from one array to another, or within the same array while a server is accessing data.

Clustering (Metro or Geo). It helps organizations to instantly replicate their data to the backup site, while making this totally transparent to the end users.

To move LUNs non-disruptively between arrays and there is a mirrored LUN between data centers, that is to read/write on both sides which are very helpful features.

• For non-disruptive migrations
• For replicating non-EMC vendor storage arrays using RecoverPoint
• High availability using VPLEX Metro
• Used as additional read cache for storage arrays

Volume replication in almost real time, across metro distances.

Storage virtualization and geographic resilience for Metro Sans, plus a great performance improvement.

The ability to move disks online without disruption to the environment.

Ability to create geographically distributed clusters.