VNX [EOL] Reviews

• FAST auto-tiering is a great feature.
• FAST cache is very good for performance.
• The unified ability allows us to have a cost effective SAN and NAS storage combined on our smaller sites.

Unified VNX allows us to consolidate our storage for better efficiency.

It is not the easiest product to implement and manage, especially on the NAS side, but that is now fixed in its successor product from Dell EMC called Unity.

Over six years.

The stability is rock solid.

There are upper limits, but these are rarely reached depending upon the VNX model being used.

Dell EMC support is good, but expensive.

We have standardised on VNX, and now on the Unity successor product, having moved away from NetApp and EVA, which were not as reliable or as flexible.

Setup can be complex for the inexperienced storage administrator, especially on the NAS side. However, with training and/or experience, the VNX product is flexible and manageable.

VNX is not the cheapest in the market for SAN. But for NAS and SAN, the product is cost effective. I recommend that new purchases look to the successor product of Dell EMC Unity for the best pricing. For licensing, make sure you request Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE), if needed, as this is not bundled as standard.

HPE Nimble is a good competing product, especially as it now has the backing of HPE. However, Nimble is a point solution as it is SAN only. If you wanted to add NAS to a Nimble, you could use VMware and UnityVSA, but those are extract costs.

VNX remains a great product. However, it is being superseded by the Dell EMC Unity product, which offers better pricing, All-Flash offerings, and a true Unity storage pool for maximum efficiency and flexibility.

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.

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.)

• Scalability
• High performance
• Easy administration

We need, in real time, to be able copy in more than two data centers, and EMC gave us a better solution with great performance.

We get good performance from all our applications like Oracle DB, SAP, Sybase DB, Exchange, and SharePoint which are running on the backend of my storage device.

We've used it for one year, alongside RPA, VMAX, and VPLEX, all by EMC.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10 - we get immediate support from EMC.

9/10 - we get immediate support from EMC.

There was no previous solution in place.

It's a complex setup as we have three different data centers, which are far from each other.

The implementation was done by a team from EMC who were 9/10.

EMC products are costly when compared to other vendors such HP, Hitachi, Dell, and NetApp.

No other options were evaluated.

If you have a banking and finance domain, then go for EMC products as they offer better performance and scalability.

• 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.

Block and NAS on multiple VNX's are all managed from the same Unisphere GUI. Plus, it has great data migration tools e.g. EMCopy.

Unisphere provides a one-stop go-to place to manage all my VNX storage arrays, saving me time, and screen space.

I preferred HP EVA over Clariion for block due to the simpler GUI, but the VNX (that uses Clariion-like block) appears more complex due to the flexibility it ultimately offers. It has more functionality/flexibility which means a more complex interface. But, all things considered, Unisphere is a very good interface. It doesn't seem too fast though, but that could be the environment rather than the VNX product, to be fair.

I've used it for four years, nine if you include when it was Clariion.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I don't like the way EMC's Powerlink support is behind a wall. You need to register an account, and join that account with your product serial numbers to open up the support pages and downloads for your products. As a consultant, I find that far too restrictive.

They are very good if you engage with them, so very high.

I use whatever my end client has purchased, be it EMC or another product. I don't often get to choose, but I would recommend a VNX if asked.

The documentation is very very good (with the exception of CAVA (optional anti-virus agent). That took some figuring out before I got it working properly, due to a subtle detail with physical/virtual data-movers. Setting one up should only be done with the documentation. never wing it.

Mostly in house, but I've worked with a vendor team post implementation where they test it end to end, and they're excellent.

I didn't choose it, but I would choose it. As mentioned above, I have enjoyed both EMC and HP's offerings in the marketplace. Depending on how simple the customer needs it to be, might sway my recommendation one way or the other, but in terms of functionality, VNX is very very good.

Watch the YouTube videos first, they're very good. If you understand what's being said, buy it.

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.

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 .