VNX [EOL] Reviews

It's easy to use, and integrate, I'm not storage-centric, as I just integrate storage along with other things. I can go in there and follow instructions to complete the job. I know all products are different, especially how they’re all clustered differently. For me, I don’t care because not looking at raw data or specifications (e.g. how many SSDs, how tiered), I just follow instructions for the virtualization aspect.

It’s one of the better industry-accepted names and standards. Not necessarily cheap, but for me it’s all about familiarity. I've worked with this type of storage for many years.

Make major changes to the file services, Celera, do something like a lite version. It used to be more solid product before unifying Clarion and Celera.

It’s very stable in all the years I've worked with it. I know it’s stable and the support is there.

It’s definitely scalable. VNX to large SAN with SDD to all with extra storage for VDI, they’re all hugely scalable. You can keep adding blocks of storage for different tiers, as well as sites of storage, with other products (replicated with backups).

All experiences with tech support have been positive. It was never problem with product itself, mostly configuration issue caused by the integrator or client. They worked through it.

I was always second fiddle as there was always a network person and virtualization person and a storage person. It's always straightforward in terms of everyone following plan and working together. The end result is always the operational system being delivered.

• NetApp
• Dell

Research stuff that’s been proven, and what you can afford.

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 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.

Tier configuration between SSD and SAS disks. The blocks with more access are moved to the SSD disk.

All the environments of the company are consolidated into only one storage. Physical end virtual systems are on the same cabinet.

I do not know, because all products function well.

Since 2010. During different years, we have worked with VMAX, VNX5300, VNX5500, VNX5800, and RPA.

Only with a big load in the CPU, because we have compression active in many LUNs.

No issues.

Technical support is very good.

Our old storage was HPE XP10000 and EVA5000. EMC storage has the best performance and functions.

The initial setup was very simple.

With this product, the licensing software and capacity are very expensive.

Yes, IBM XIV and HPE 3PAR.

First look for many options and compare. I am sure that EMC will convince you.

All of the VMware farm is configured into this storage.

• Good performance for VM environments
• In one cabinet, we have many environments: VMware, Oracle, Adabas, NAS (CIFS and NFS resources), and mix disks on tier configurations
• Tier configuration with different disks (SAS, SATA, Flash)
• The software for management is very user-friendly
• Snapshots for backup and refresh development on test environments

There is an easy replication process between distinct data centers via VPLEX and/or RPA. But I hope in the future that EMC/Dell could replicate this with other types of storage.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10.

The setup was very easy.

The pricing and licensing were both very balanced.

This is a good option if you are looking for good performance.

In an on-premises four-server cluster where there was a replication VNX5300 on a different location for backup and disaster recovery purposes.

It didn't perform as advertised because the instant snapshotting feature while working as advertised slowed down the performance of the entire storage solution.

The replicating of the entire storage unit to a different location was a very useful function. It made disaster recovery possible in hours instead of days.

The performance impact snapshotting had on the cluster was enormous. The entire cluster performance took a performance impact of about 30% as soon as we created one snapshot of all the volumes created on the cluster.

The cost of the product, because it's considered an entry level product for what it does, but it had everything we needed for a great price.

All our storage is now in two places, a primary site and a DR site. Network shares, VM storage, etc. all come from the same physical infrastructure at both locations. Instead of getting more servers for storage, we were able to over-provision this and have had plenty of storage for the past two years. We recently just added another DAE to both locations pretty easily which extends the storage even more.

It only supports 10Gb copper, and cannot do 10Gb fiber. The system health screen could be more useful and show more important information. No support for flash drives.

I've used it for two years.

Stability has been rock solid, as we have been running both units for over two years with no major problems. There are redundant power supplies for everything. We have lost a DAE because of a double power failure and the unit still was fully functional, once the DAE came back online it meshed back into the array seamlessly.

EMC customer service has always been spot on. Any issues we have are dealt with right away.

EMC has great online support and tech support over the phone. Their knowledge base is pretty easy to use and updates are easy to find.

Deployment was quite straight forward, we did not need any assistance from EMC. Any small questions we had could easily be found online or via YouTube.

It was very straightforward as long as you have a basic knowledge of networks and network storage. The instructions provide a great starting point and you can continue online for more and better information.

It was done in-house, with just a single deployment person with a second person helping with ISCSI and other configuration options.

We have not done any calculations, but the costs we have saved in power consumption, data center space, and cooling cannot be ignored. We went from three full racks of servers, to a half rack (not all EMC, the rest is a Cisco UCS deployment). The savings alone on the three factors above over the past two years have probably paid for this investment already.

Pricing is very good, especially for educational institutions. Licensing is pretty straight forward really, it's just a support contract that is needed to keep everything up to date but there are no extra license fees or anything once you get the unit.

We evalulated HP, Dell, and NetApp storage products in the same class

Use Google and YouTube when implementing, there are lots of tips and advice out there, along with best practices. There's lots of stuff not on EMC's site but other helpful sites as well. There is a pretty large community now for this product line.

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.