VNX [EOL] Reviews

• 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.

• Its reliability and ease of use.
• Single console for managing block and file (CIFS/NFS)
• Data replication to DR site for both block and file
• Auto tiering - Data movement in-between the pool
• Fast cache - Global cache for low end arrays
• EMC ViPR - A complete insight into the storage performance
• Deduplication and compression

With more than 145 applications including SAP for different businesses running in our environment, our requirement was always to have a storage with a very good response time and performance.

So far we haven't had many issues with the VNX. However, the Data Mover (that manages CIFS/NFS) part needs some improvements. EMC's new storage (Unity) has no DM's as the NAS functionality is all virtual.

I have used EMC products for nine years and VNX products for six years.

No, we have never had issues with stability apart from one instance where we were hit by a bug in the VNX code. After an upgrade, it was resolved permanently.

No issues with scalability.

One thing I would like to explicitly mention here is the EMC support. It is by far one of the best supports you will ever get in comparison with any vendor. The Live chat option gives it an extra edge and the technical support is always top notch.

Yes, we were using HPE Storage, which was not a bad solution, but EMC wins hands down when it comes to the Enterprise storage. We were having stability/performance issues with HPE Storage.

Initial setup is very straightforward and easy as long as you know what goes where.

Yes, when it comes to pricing, EMC might be a little on the higher side, but you can't buy the performance of a Ferrari in a Toyota. Hence, you get what you pay for.

Since we were using HPE Storage, we had a look at IBM Storage as well. After a features comparison and our requirements, EMC was the right choice.

EMC VNX is a mid-range enterprise storage. Make sure to choose the right system and do have a look at their EMC Unity series that has hybrid as well as All-Flash arrays. Before doing any implementation, make sure to do right-sizing and you will be good for the next five years.

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.

Tiering, because it allows your data to dynamically move among different disk types based on demand in the last 24 hours. This removes the manual work to keep data in certain disk types.

We actually stopped using the VNX as it was ill-equipped to handle our environment with the way EMC spec’d it out. I do not recommend the Gen 1 VNX to anyone in this day and age. It’s outdated technology and a newer far less expensive array can more than adequately handle 99% of the tasks better than the VNX architecture.

EMC could have made the effort to spec the device appropriately. Instead, they low-balled the config in 2011 to make the price tag look alluring. Then, less than 12 months in, we needed to spend 35% of the cost of the entire array to put enough disks in the array to make it both perform and contain enough capacity, which only lasted until mid-2013. The device had multiple issues from 2013 – 2016 and numerous support calls to no avail, until I told them they would lose our business if they couldn’t identify the issue.

They finally spilled the beans, years after all of the issues, that the device was not spec’d appropriately for our environment. If they would have been honest about it, instead of cheaping out the config to make the solution appear appealing, this could have been avoided.

The competitor’s product was more expensive but would have destroyed the VNX’s capabilities. All they cared about was the sale.

Six years.

Yes, there were many performance issues due to the storage pool latency being averaging more than 7ms, causing user-side impacts; spikes all the way to 256ms, array-wide. All issues surround the original EMC config, and poor architecture in their attempt to add disks to fix their own issue. It caused us three years of production-level issues including downtime to key servers.

Yes, this solution is sensitive to scalability in the sense that you require certain proportions of all three tiers of disk if you enable Auto-Tiering. This resulted in performance issues with the mid-tier having insufficient capacity. The array was thrashing to attempt to use 7200 RPM SATA disks in the lowest tier since they had the capacity. This was disastrous and EMC would not even acknowledge the issue until they forced us to prove it.

Two out of 10 for overall technical support. Simple hardware issues like failed drives were promptly dealt with, but performance issues were treated like mysteries even by tier 2 support and engineers. This went on for over three years. We had to use our own team to prove to them, with their own tools, what the issue was in the NAR files.

HPE EVA. End-of-life standard lifecycle replacement.

EMC made it overly complex, and miswired the B fabric on our fibre channel. We fixed it a year later, after it caused an outage. To be clear, this was a paid-for EMC install engineer. Mistakes happen, but costing a company in downtime is not acceptable.

Ask thrice, not once, not twice… Ensure it is spec’d for your needs for performance and capacity. Ensure you have the appropriate suites purchased up front, and always buy the warranty for all years up front, or EMC will gouge you on years four and five. The $75,000 in support we would have pain in year four for a maxed out VNX 5300, let us simply pay for a chunk of a next-gen, all flash array and solve all issues for latency and performance as well as capacity.

Yes, first-gen HPE 3PAR and IBM.

Stay away, it’s old technology now. Look at newer arrays and features.

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.

A hybrid tiered storage such as VNX enables data where IOPS is critical to be placed in SSD and archive data to be placed in NL-SAS disks where the IOPS are not in demand.

It is very stable even during multiple power failures.

EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this.

There were no stability issues.

There were scalability issues, the scalability options are limited due to supported SSD.

I would rate the technical support a 10/10.

Previously, we had Clariion, VNX was the next technological shift.

It is very easy to set up, guides are available on the EMC site .

The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable, the yearly EMC is more expensive

We looked at IBM Storewize V7000.

Go through EMC best practices available for proper disk sizing and allocation.

• It has increased our availability as we have gone to full virtualization.
• It has greatly improved our efficiency as we have reduced server deployment time.
• It has also reduced our energy costs as we now have fewer servers with its support for virtualization.

• Integration with VMware
• Support for virtualization
• High performance
• Easy management

Poor connection to FC.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent, but somewhat slow in the African region.

We did not use different solution before.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Pricing is somewhat higher, especially in Zambia, perhaps due to the low sales volume.

It is a great product: scalable, reliable, and robust.

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.)

We took a while to jump onto VNX – largely for file with our block storage handled by EMC Symmetrix. VNX turned out to be the rugged little brother that went in, did the job and kept on working while using the same tools – but at lower price.

The most valuable feature is the tight VMware integration, due to the migration from bare metal to virtualized environments and then on to the cloud.

VNX provides the full feature set, automated storage tiering to optimize flash, and file dedupe in what used to be a price-competitive package. That area is now being ceded to Unity as the storage landscape undergoes sweeping changes with HCI.

Storage is undergoing a sea change in affordable cost per bit, solid-state drives and new latency requirements for applications. Over time, VNX has become pricier than its competitors, and we have turned enthusiastically to Unity. While the VNX-F was released several years ago as an AFA in VNX trim, we still went with EMC XtremIO instead because of performance and pricing.

We embraced VNX after it was a mature product and have not had stability issues.

We have not encountered scalability issues, but then we did not try to use VNX beyond its target application range.

We have received excellent support from EMC and now Dell.

We were using EMC Symmetrix and NetApp previously but moved our midrange file to VNX due to the commonality of the tool sets and tight VMware integration.

Initial setup was a breeze compared to our previous EMC Symmetrix space. It was kind of like going from manual to automatic transmission.

Time your acquisitions and license discussions around year-end close.

As indicated, we were on EMC Symmetrix and NetApp. VNX came along at the right time for us and allowed for support and tools consolidation, provided more services and allowed us to reduce overall support costs.

Be clear on what your storage applications are and what level of scale you need. For the big Kahuna in the back end, we still use EMC Symmetrix for our block, but for small to midrange, our VNX is giving way to Unity for price points. Check your application profiles as your mileage will vary.

It is our Tier-2 storage which is easy to provision from and has decent performance.

I really value deduplication and compression to save space.

The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX.

We actually had data loss from too many simultaneous drive failures on the 7500.

We have not yet encountered any scalability issues in our environment.

Technical support was on a par with typical EMC. In other words, not the best and not the worst.

We were moving to IBM v7000 for price. However, it doesn't support NAS

The initial setup was straightforward.

Look at other newer options. Unisphere is slow and Java based. This is not the easiest array to manage.

It was already installed when I was hired.

To me, the mid-tier storage arrays are getting displaced by lesser expensive All-flash options.

EMC has been selling XIO at a very affordable price.

Hitachi has a lot of cool features out-of-the-box that EMC does not have.