VMAX [EOL] Reviews

Our primary use of this product is for our core banking servers over FC.

It is a high end storage, minimal downtime, reliable, good performance, get speedy support when we need.

The user interface is good, and it is also customizable. snap and clone operations easy. 

Stability and availability should be improved.

I have been using EMC VMAX for about six years.

I can't say %100 stable, but it has nearly %100 stability

it can grow with disk and controller

The technical support is good.

Prior to using VMAX, we used other solutions by EMC. They had reached end-of-life, which is why we changed.

The initial setup is straightforward. I did not find it to be complex.

Our in-house team handled the deployment.

Our licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis.

This is a good product but my advice is to complete a proof of concept before buying it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this product as part of our storage solution.

The most valuable features are the interface and performance.

Support by EMC for this product is good.

I have been using this EMC product for about five years.

This is a stable storage product.

Scalability has not been an issue for us. We have about 5,000 users including internal ones, those connecting from the internet, mobile, and other channels. At this point, we don't plan on increasing our usage.

The technical support is very good and we are satisfied with it.

Prior to the VMAX, we were using other models by EMC. We switched when they became older and went out of life. This itself is an older product and we may be replacing it at some point with an all-flash storage solution.

I would like to see support for high-availability.

The initial setup is not complex.

Our in-house team handled implementation and deployment.

Our licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis.

Overall, this is a good product, although I would suggest implementing a proof of concept before buying it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for a VMware and Exchange environment. 

We like VMAX's Enterprise capability. 

We have never had a bad experience with it because we never had failures. It has good data availability and the performance is also okay.

The pricing is a bit expensive. That is the reason we are now currently we are looking for other solutions. That's the reason we are looking at AFF and Unity. We are also considering PowerStore. 

They have improved a lot in their last releases. The management is now quite easy. Before it was tedious because people were concerned about the administration tasks and now they made it simple.

In the next release, I would like to see NAS features.

We have been using VMAZ for 10 years because we have multiple products. We have refreshed twice. The last refresh happened four years ago and we are happy with VMAX.

It is scalable. We have 7,000 to 8,000 users. 

For IT, our staff run multiple products, there is no single dedicated person for storage. So there isn't one person dedicated to this solution but rather someone who handles a variety of tasks. 

I have worked with Hitachi and HP products. 

One of the main advantages is that if you compare Enterprise Array it is all the same. They all have the same features. The only difference is support. EMC support is the only differentiator. They have an army of people in support.

Around eight years ago, the setup was complex. They recently changed the solution and management suite. It is now quite easy. We cannot compare it with NetApp or Unity but it is okay. 

Upgrades are seamless and don't cause any interruptions. We don't need an admin guy to do any upgrades unless of course, it is a code upgrade or firmware upgrade. Everything is done by using the gateway. That is another advantage. 

Aim to implement additional features like de-duplication and compression. That should enhance the experience. Focus on unified features. People are now more cost-effective. They want to have one box with multiple features.

I would rate EMC VMAX an eight out of ten. I would like to see more deduplication and compression features in order to make it a ten. 

We have two data centers and we have VMAX in each one. We use VPlex to replicate data between the two.

This solution is resilient. There is zero downtime. 

It's a workhorse.

The way you configure larger size volumes needs improvement. Currently, the one that we have is a single volume limit of 240 gigs. If you wanted bigger than that you have to do meta volumes to combine them.

My understanding is the VMAX3 and the PowerMax, did away with that, making it a lot easier to provision storage than in the past.

Scalability with the 2013 version was an area that needed improvement, but they have fixed it with later products.

All of the issues that I am currently facing with this version, for example, being able to create larger volumes and making it easier to manage, have all been implemented in the new versions of this solution.

The company had it installed in 2015, which was before I arrived. Personally, I have been working with it for a couple of years.

It's very stable.

We are trying to scale a vintage VMAX. As far as increasing capacity, it is a real nightmare.

The technical support is very good. We had a few problems with it, but that's a rare instance where I have opened a case, other than failed hardware. The support has been very good for this product.

From my understanding, EMC completed the initial set up.

I don't know what the licensing costs are but the support and software are included.

There are additional costs to the standard licensing fee, and it just depends on the package.

The version that we are using is very near to the end of its life. 

We will occasionally do code updates, but it is very difficult to buy disc drives for it anymore. I am not even sure that you can buy capacity upgrades.

It's fairly easy to implement this product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use the VMAX³ All-Flash Subsystem to support our major Production and QA systems. This specific system currently supports approximately three hundred terabytes of data that includes several Oracle, SQL & DB2 Databases, SharePoint, SAP, JDE Systems, ESX, Windows, Unix, Linux, etc. We are planning on expanding the VMAX³ footprint and will likely double utilization within the next few months.

The VMAX³ is one of a few systems we have that's truly non-disruptive. Upgrades are coordinated, require zero application downtime, and can be completed in a very short window. Everything is truly active-active. Uptime and reliability are critical success factors within our organization.

EMC has made remarkable improvements in the overall management simplicity. Deploying, Expanding, and Modifying systems are easier than ever. Other valuable features include:

• Easy and non-impacting Data-At-Rest Encryption.


• Comprehensive compression that reduces data consumption utilization while maintaining overall system performance.

I'm always interested in ways we can scale out and avoid monolithic migrations from one array to another every four to five years. Yes, there are a ton of easy migration methods, but I'd like to see improvements where we can scale out an existing array and remove older controllers\drives\etc., within the same subsystem.

We migrated off of an older VMAX 20K, VNX 5700 & an older HDS array.

We are a local Dell EMC partner. We are upgrading our storage capacity. Soon we will be moving to PowerMax All-Flash for SAN environments to consolidate block, file, and open storage. This is the solution that we think will help us to increase performance, with regards to our storage requirements.

VMAX3 is our main system for storage. All our systems and all our virtualizations are connected to it. In terms of expanding it, we are replacing it with a new system, the PowerMax 2000 so our current VMAX3 platform will be decommissioned soon.

We are switching to PowerMax 2000 because we are looking for improved performance. We see it as the best fit for our requirements in terms of the performance and the overall cost.

Improvements for PowerMax might be tricky since what we already know that what we will receive is enough for us. All of our requirements are supported by the current version of PowerMax that we purchased.

As far as improvements for VMAX3, it would have been great to have it across all systems.

VMAX3 is stable. We haven't encountered any major issues.

Technical support has been good as far as our support is concerned. Their response time has been good. I'm speaking for both our local support as well as the remote support we have received.

I've been using VMAX3 for approximately five years now. I use it for all our virtualization needs across all our server environments. We found this tool to be quite valuable. Though soon we will be migrating or should I say upgrading to the PowerMax.

I think we might still have some HP 3PAR 8400 kicking around as well but it was implemented before my time.

The VMAX3 solution has been around four to five years. It was already operational when I arrived at the company.

I have two storage administrators with me. Both doing the storage and the backup solution. for VMAX3.

Setup costs include a three-year support contract for PowerMax. The contract comes with renewal of the hardware. We usually renew based on the duration of the contract with our outsourcing partner. Generally, when we make a purchase, we usually purchase the tool with all the necessary specifications and of course, we must pay for all the additional features.

The advice I would give to others looking to implement EMC VMAX is to look at it from the costing and support perspective. This is my advice since we don't have that many requirements aside from the tools, overall performance and the cost.

On a scale from one to ten, 10 being the best, I would give VMAX3 an 8 out of 10.

I like the many new features, especially the all-flash solution. 

I would like this solution to integrate the solution that Dell EMC vPlex offers. In addition, I think they should have a better means to test the equipment.

We have had no issues with the stability of this solution.

There is ROI for this product. It is always something I look at when choosing a solution. 

We looked at HP and Hitachi as other potential solutions. We have two Hitachi subsystems and one Dell EMC subsystem right now. 

Used for our storage with applications that need storage on the SAN. We also use it with RecoverPoint for replication to another site that also uses VMAX storage. We also use it with RecoverPoint for for replication instead of SRDF.

Since using the VMAX that we have had in our organization for many years, after moving from CX4 and prior to that EVA, we have been able to present storage from the VMAX to hosts without any problems. It works with our replication technology, which is not SRDF, which is native replication technology. We use RecoverPoint.

• Storage
• Unisphere
• RecoverPoint
• Reporting
• Creating LUNs
• Reliability
• Dependability
• Resilience

• Ease of use
• Reporting
• Performance management
• Performance
• Dependability
• Resilience replication
• Power

Zero downtime and high performance applications. We support customers with applications that cannot incur unplanned outages.

We have stabilized many environments with VMAX. We have helped people consolidate numerous applications to provide better uptime and performance. 

Stability: Every environment struggles with something that can cause a disruption to application uptime. VMAX is a rock solid foundation to deploy applications which cannot incur a disruption of service.

Better speed to release new features that have become industry standards. EMC created so many standards in the past. Now, it seems they are playing a me-too game and lagging behind in some areas, specifically data reduction.

The most significant feature of this product is the FAST and FAST VP. FAST VP allows the array to intelligently manage the access to the data, wherein the data that demands high IOPS is placed into the performance tier. Whereas the data with a low IOPS requirement is placed into the capacity tier and everything happens automatically based on preset thresholds.

There is also storage tiering, secured access through initiator groups, and storage groups. 

This product has enabled dynamic allocation of disk resources, and at the same time, improved the data access speed and application performance by a large extent.

Manageability is a bit of a challenge, as the user interface to access the array is not very user-friendly. Many important service consoles, such as the SymmWin is hidden from customer access. Hence, it blocks critical actions, such as failed disk change, etc.

Three years.

No issues encountered with stability.

This product can scale massively given its strong underlying infrastructure.

Technical support is very affirmative and efficient.

Yes. Previously, we had an EMC VNX solution. It was good, but was not suitable for large scale enterprise solutions, hence the switch took place. Also, it was a unified storage which was not the requirement in our environment. Therefore, no upgrade to the same product line was done.

It was complex, as it was a different platform altogether.

This part is taken care by another team, so I can't comment on it.

Yes, HPE and IBM storage solutions were considered, but VMAX seemed to meet most of our requirements.

Planning is very important, as this is a product with great capability. If not used effectively, most of it would be wasted, which would affect the ROI.