VNX [EOL] Reviews

Primary storage in our data center, and we use it with an HPE SAN switch. We've worked with EMC for about three years.

It has very simple management with reliability and also security. We do not have any complexity with these products.

When we started the process of looking for a SAN vendor I had four primary criteria: reliability, performance, cost, and simplicity. We were really looking for a unicorn and were fully expected to have to make compromises in one of those areas. The Nimble CS-Series was recommended by our solutions provider, and we were blown away. Not only was it the most affordable option, but it was the easiest to deploy, had the best performance, and has proven to be reliable with 100% uptime.

SDS (software-defined storage) is so required in next releases because we are going to the next generation of IT infrastructure environment.

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.

We have all the information residing on the same hardware, the same storage. So if the servers go down, we have already secured the data in the storage.

Multi-tiering, because it positively affects the efficiency of the storage space.

The next release is the Unity storage. That is the new family. Many of the features that are included in the Unity have improved over the VNX features. The VNX is a little bit old. What would help would be if the VNX had embedded encryption. That would be great.

It's really stable. We haven't had any issue such as data unavailability or data loss.

The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations. So the scalability is a little bit limited. But that has been improved in the new storage family called Unity.

We do use technical support and it is always good.

The initial setup was simple and really fast.

When we compared it with other products, the performance and the security were the advantages that this storage gives us.

When selecting a vendor there are many criteria we look at but those that come to mind are scalability, security, resilience.

I think it's a good solution. It has many benefits, features that are of interest for many customers. 

With the new system, the Unity, many of the deficiencies of the VNX were solved. But the VNX offers features and stability that other products don't. It's really reliable.

We use it for our production environment for the last 5 years. We use it as a Unified box which includes both File and Block storage on the same unit.

Our company saved money in maintaining the unified platform in most of our locations and has the ability to perform backups and replication of the unit with similar arrays.

The VNX 5700 provides a large number of features including the ability to work for both file and block as a unified array. The ability to run a unified array is a great advantage when the company economics would not allow you to have separate arrays for your servers and another one for your file systems and use the unit as NAS. Through a single interface called UNISPHERE™, we manage the array. It allows you to administer both the block and file in a single pane. The process of extending the size of either an LUN or a file system is very intuitive. It also provides a command line interface that you can use to connect using Putty.exe but some of the commands that you can execute through the GUI are not available in CLI, or at least that is what EMC support has told me.

Another great feature is the checkpoints for file systems. We use the checkpoints as backups for our file system instead of having them in a separate product. It is a risk to put the backups and production data in the same array, but we understood it and went with it. We have limited times when our checkpoints become corrupted for some reason (reaching a maximum size of a file system 16TB) or another but the majority of the time works according to plan. For the block, you can use LUN cloning and have the ability to present a copy of the same LUN used for production to your test environment and test applications, programs, OS, or any others without affecting your production environment.

The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data. In our scenario, we only use it for disaster recovery. Since we have a global presence and we are tasked to protect data from around the globe, we have enabled replication between locations. The replication works well between VNX and Celerra NS480s, NS40s, NS20s or NX4s. You can also set replication between VNXe (1st generation, like VNXe3300, VNX3150, or others) where your VNXe is the source. However, you can not set up a file system replication when the VNXe is the target of your replication job. Also, there are limitations with VNXe replication (second generation, like VNXe3200) since it would not allow you to establish replication partners.

UNISPHERE™ Analyzer allows you to see the hot spots on the block side. When you enable the Analyzer, it collects performance data and then with EMC support you can see the areas of problem in the array. It allows you to justify adding more space or moving your servers around to other LUNs with less saturation. Once the user becomes familiar with how the Analyzer works, he/she could run it without engaging support and identify areas of concern. It is very helpful to show the application teams if the storage is causing the slowness of a particular application hosted in the specific LUN or not.

Once you establish a replication job, when the file system is synchronizing its data to the target file system, it tends to create a balloon effect where it creates a file system that grows as the new data is synchronizing. It would be very helpful if the replication job could incorporate a self-cleaning job after the synchronization job completes to reduce the size of the file system in the target automatically. Very often, we have to run a script called “SavVolReclaim” to clean up space consumed while the replication is in progress. If the replication job hits its maximum capacity of 16TB while synchronizing, it stops the replication job. By adding this reclaim process natively, it would eliminate additional unnecessary work for the storage administrators.

It would be very helpful to get an automated report that shows you the size of the checkpoints and get warnings when a checkpoint is reaching either maximum capacity per a file system or hitting the ceiling on the SavVol pool consumption.

A few years back, we ran into a problem where datamover hosting our file systems panicked due to an incompatibility with a Mac OS, and in another case with WAN Accelerator SMB protocols. The VNX5700 is very stable, and it has a lot of redundancy built in.

In this version of the VNX, the maximum size of a file system is 16TB. The maximum number of read-only checkpoints per file system is 96 and 16 writeable checkpoints. The maximum number of physical drives in the VNX5700 is 500. However, you can work with EMC and ask them for RFQ to go beyond the number of physical drives to add a few more.

EMC technical support is great when you get the right resource. Like any other support center, they have levels of support. Level 1 is an entry level person that is learning more about the product and sometimes is new to the company. The Level 1s are great for simple questions or issues. When you face more complex issues, try to ask them to escalate the case to the next level. They need to justify the reason to escalate the case, so the more information that you can provide the better. Level 2 and Level 3 are more skilled and have more experience with the product. Level 4s are the subject matter experts, they know the product well and understand issues and interoperability with other products.

A great added benefit is that you can add your VNX to the ESRS gateways. When a problem arises, EMC could connect to the array directly and start troubleshooting the issue before you get in to see what is causing the problem. This activity would generate a support request, and the EMC Technical Support Engineer could contact the person included in the system by either email or phone and let him/her know of the issue that the array is facing. They would not make any changes without your written authorization.

We have the Celerra NS480s, NS40s, NS20. We switched because the arrays were at the end of life by EMC support.

We migrated from Celerras to VNX. The migration process was very complex. We needed to make sure that the CIFS servers had all the data and the replication of data would not start over from zero and saturate our network traffic with data that we already replicated once.

We used EMC professional services to assist with the implementation.

EMC is a good company with which to negotiate pricing, especially if you are a new customer for them. In our experience, it is better to ask for End of Life (EOL) of a particular product before you purchase it. I would suggest buying five-year support contracts so EMC can provide you with a better discount. The trend in the industry is coming to flat support contract year after year, but EMC is not there yet. EMC Support year to year could become cost prohibitive. Only buy the licenses for what you would need. The sales team may try to sell you everything. If needed, engage a consultant to review your configuration and pricing.

We did not evaluate other products in proof of concept, but we looked at EMC Isilon, NetApp, and Hitachi.

The VNX is a good platform, but like any other storage unit, it has some limitations. If you are doing a migration from your current environment, make sure that you purchase professional services that include physical or remote presence during the migration or cutover. Write all your requirements and make sure that the EMC sales team validates with the professional team all your requirements. Although EMC would assist you in most of the process, I prefer to get everything in writing and not just in words. Take the time to thoroughly define all your requirements and identify the items that you would perform versus the vendor to avoid surprises when you are in the middle of the migration or cutover.

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.

FAST Cache & FAST Pool are very useful and similar to the SDS solution on a single storage system.

Source deduplication and compression will improve the TCO of these storage systems.

About five years.

The product is rather stable.

Yes, we have had issues. The system is limited by the number of enclosures.

The best tech support we've had has been from EMC.

We've moved from the EMC CLARiiON CX4 series to EMC VNX.

Not very complicated, mostly straightforward.

IBM, NetApp.

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.

• 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.

• Levels of performance
• Protection
• Compliance
• Ease of management

In a banking environment, on which we required a very high throughput for our database, we have used this product and our desired response was received.

They may change the disks from NL-SAS to Flash, but it would be costlier for customers.

We implemented the solution in 2015 and it is still in our environment until now.

No.

No, it is easily scalable.

EMC technical support is good in India. They meet the SLAs well.

In our previous solution, we were getting less performance from our DB. So, it was a better idea to change to EMC.

Initial EMC setup is easier than other Storage product vendors. It is mandatory to know the default IPs of SPs and the password for the admin user.

Pricing and licensing quotes can be requested by the vendor's sales team. There response rate is high.

We also had the option of NetApp and HP Storage, but from a pricing and support perspective, we preferred EMC.

It's a good product and easy to deploy.

• Auto Tiering
• It has a good, high-level of storage.

With integration, you can compress, and reduce the load of your Oracle DB, in relation to HCC.

Main business applications run on it.

For about five years.

No.

Not in this case, but it has its limits based on the model you chose.

The specialist are a 10 out of 10. Unfortunately to reach them, it could cost you hours on the phone.

I am a consultant. Customers change solutions all the time because of reliability, relationships, and costs.

It was easy. Just know the protocol (what to turn on first and what IP address to connect to).

Oracle is never the cheaper solution. Compared to others, it is always among the most expensive.

Yes, it was compared with EMC VMAX and Dell Compellent.

Upon implementation, use the guide from the official manual, and if they have access to the EIS.