VNX [EOL] Reviews

They have more different/flexible models in the midrange storage area In comparison with other vendors . They have also built in VMware specific features . Lastly, it has reasonable performance/cost.

In a virtualized infrastructure based on VMware Hypervisor, the VNX series SANs provide some useful vendor specific features for us.

• Storage processor architect for real active/active HA
• ASIC based functions are needed

I've used it for about four years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

In comparison to other products, VNX scales out well.

It's satisfactory. This company really care for their customers.

So far, we have had a response to all our queries from tech support.

No previous solution was in place.

The deployment procedures are very simple, and based on a step-by-step installation guide.

We implemented our device ourselves .

We have preloaded/license free vendor specific feature for VMware infrastructure with EMC VNX Series SAN Systems. It would be a good choice for midrange businesses due to the performance/features and cost. The licensing terms and conditions are a flowing Pay-As-You-Grow method and it's a good option for long term planning.

We only compared different VNX models.

Pay attention to the initialization procedure. Also, the reinitialization procedures are very complex after the initial VNX product .

• Auto Tiering: Ability to automatically move data from fast SSD drives to low cost disk drives and vise versa.
• Performance: Increase performance with FAST Cache (SSD), QoS and Auto Tiering.
• Unified storage: Provides capabilities for both block and file storage.

• Improved Performance: Since implementing VNX, we achieved a 10 times increase in the performance for its end users.
• Increased Scalability: As we continue to grow, VNX can scale to meet the needs of the growing business without compromising performance.
• Simplified Management: VNX's ease of use and Unisphere management software allow us to provision new storage in just minutes and instantly view its performance.
• Data Protection: VNX's replication solutions deliver comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery.

I think one area where we would like to see improvement is better deduplication and compression. Some other vendors offer better deduplication and compression ratios and performance.

Five years.

No, I think VNX is one of the stable storage products available in the market.

No. Very easy to scale, both capacity and performance-wise.

A nine out of 10.

We had EMC Celerra (file storage) and Clariion (block storage). When EMC introduced VNX, it provided both file and block storage capabilities. It was a no brainer for us to replace our existing storage with VNX. VNX made storage management simple as well as the cost of maintenance went down from two storage arrays to one.

EMC did the initial setup. Though VNX management is pretty straightforward. Utilizing Unisphere, we can provision storage in matter of minutes.

From a licensing perspective, my advice to others would be to take a look at VNX Total Efficiency Pack. This unlocks all the features of VNX.

We did not.

My advice would be to do research on VNX application performance.

It has enabled us to consolidate storage, both primary and secondary, on a single platform. This simplified administration provided the necessary performance to our virtualized infrastructure.

• Reliability, excellent support by EMC, and VMware integration
• High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows.
• SSD tier: Provided desired performance with fewer disks
• Storage pooling and auto-tiering: Simplified storage management
• Seamless integration with VMware
• Fairly simple administration using Unisphere

I would like to see a larger SP cache and finer grained auto-tiering.

Based on our workloads, we see repeatedly in performance reports that the built-in controller (SP) cache of our VNX model is not sufficiently large, resulting in forced cache flushing.

The report states that this "can be addressed with a shared global cache in next generation VNX systems". But for this VNX generation (1st), the cache size results in an overloaded system.

Regarding auto-tiering, this generation VNX FAST algorithm moves data in 1GB chunks between tiers. With our predominantly transaction oriented workload (random reads) this didn't afford benefits.

So when we purchased new VNXs (same generation), we configured the SSD tier as FAST Cache, a large 2nd tier consisting of 10K disks with a small 3rd tier with NL-SAS disks. Had the block size been smaller, auto-tiering may have been more effective for our workloads.

We did not encounter any stability issues.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support was fantastic.

We switched because the previous solution was outdated. We were using Multiple IBM DS4700, external SCSI arrays, and HP MSA.

We needed to consolidate storage along with server consolidation on modern and faster storage technology that would integrate with VMware.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was part of the virtualization project undertaken by our partner.

We evaluated NetApp.

The product has been superseded.

• Fast VP
• Fast cache
• Snap clone
• Snap shot
• RecoverPoint
• SAN copy
• Mirror copy
• Access Logix

I have worked on CLARiiON and all series of VNX.

I implemented and performed the migration myself.

EMC pricing is too expensive, like the Apple brand iPhone in the cellphone market.

It is hard to say which features are the most valuable. All other arrays can do pretty much the same, so it's hard to tell. At least I haven't used any feature that would be unique to other arrays.

As long as I have been working at my current company, it has always been one of EMC's biggest customers, and has had the most EMC certified engineers in the world, so the company's whole business is based on EMC's products.

• Upgrade the GUI
• Full integration with VMware
• The Unisphere for VNX needs improvement as it is old and slow.

I have used VNX 5700 for three years, but only for the NAS file system. For VNX 8000, it's been six months already, but only for block.

When everything is standardized and unified, it is pretty stable.

I have not encountered any issues with stability, but a friend of mine did in another company. They had problems with snapshots, which made the whole VNX very slow. EMC wasn't able to fix the issue, so they had to stop using snapshots.

No issues. It has always been used in small isolated environments.

Technical support is a nine out of 10. It's fast and always fixes the issues. It would be a 10 out of 10 if sometimes I wouldn't have to tell Level 2 support how to navigate using Linux commands. Level 3 is good though.

Previously, I worked with 5700 because I worked in another company. The previous version could be changed just to handle bigger loads, but that is not the case neither in the current version nor in my current company.

Initial setup is usually done by the vendor itself. The product comes preconfigured, though you have to adjust it a little bit. Everything seems to be fairly simple.

Pricing depends on the version, and the version depends on the environment you have. Plan what do you need, then decide what to buy. These days it is not necessary to have all the features in the array, which may cost a lot. If you are using VMware, it can do the same, sometimes for less.

Sadly, I did not have the chance to evaluate other products. The customer chose himself. In my other company, we didn't want to lose the EMC Elite support package and stuck with EMC, not choosing another vendor.

It's a known product. It's a fairly stable product, but you may get more features from other vendors for less. Try them, too. Like the 16Gb SAN, which EMC still does not offer, and the 32Gb. which is already on the way.

It has a simple-to-manage GUI and provides very good performance for the load-intensive applications. Also, the data tiering capabilities are good.

• FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself.
• SNAP feature: Takes only 10% of the space, an improvement compared to the earlier space utilization with RLPs.
• NAS: Using CIFS, NFS, and mixed mode shares is not as cumbersome as when compared with NetApp.

The processing speeds of the Xeon controllers and scalability options are areas with room for improvement:

• Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones.
• Also, the scalability (connectivity between racks; daisy-chaining made more robust - basically, loops of 8 DAEs to be enhanced).

We had no stability issues. Bug fixes are released from time to time and uptime performance with best practices is guaranteed.

We encountered scalability as it is limited by backend slots, and NAS performance is significantly reduced when scaling.

Technical support has superb response times and expertise.

We did not previously use a different solution.

The architecture is fairly simple; hence, the setup has never been complex.

Before choosing, we looked at EVA from HPE and Compellent from Dell.

It is a good product with a simple setup and easy administration.

The product is simple to install and manage. (It has a better GUI compared to others, with performance monitoring embedded within.)

VNX 5200 works well with a medium VMware cluster. It has good performance and enables hardware disk replication. This is great, because before that, the customer was using a software replication solution that had many problems.

From my point of view, the configuration that I can sell is restricted to the EMC best practices. It is hard to make a mistake in a solution. It means the configuration has good performance and scalability options.

VNX can improve by offering flexible upgrade options. It's not possible to add a single HDD to a current array and there are fixed rules to make upgrades.

When I work with other vendors like IBM, I can add a single disk to an array to get more capacity, it's simple. For VNX, you have to add a new array, not just a single disk.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

It is easy to scale.

I would rate the level of technical support as very good.

This storage solution replaced an IBM DS4700 and a V7000. They were outdated.

Review your needs and consider the right licensing.

The stability of the hardware, and its ability of manage millions of IOPS, provides great comfort to system administrators, IT managers and CIOs.

With respect to high I/O load during peak business hour and stable replication (remote site mirror), VNC has improved very well. The user is facing less "Administratively Fracture" or "System Fracture", as when using their previous system.

The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages.

The device is nicely planned and user-friendly, but the administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible. Also, the interface is delayed on updating its status (of snapshot).

No issues.

No issues.

Before using EMC VNX, EMC CLARiiON had been used.

I would rate the implementation team as a seven out of 10.

Reducing dependency on JavaServer Pages (JSP) could improve the administrative overhead.