VNX [EOL] Reviews

• Fast VP
• Fast cache
• Snap clone
• Snap shot
• RecoverPoint
• SAN copy
• Mirror copy
• Access Logix

I have worked on CLARiiON and all series of VNX.

I implemented and performed the migration myself.

EMC pricing is too expensive, like the Apple brand iPhone in the cellphone market.

• Raid pools
• Snapshots

• With raid pools, you aren't limited with RAID size.
• Snapshots will ease your testing on the applications.

• Caching
• Auto-tiering

I've been using block OE 5.32 and file level 7 and the VNX 2 series, block OE 5.33 and file level 8 for six years.

Not really.

If it's configured properly after sizing, then no.

No, it's easy to upgrade and expand.

Customer Service:

It's great.

Technical Support:

It's great.

HP EVA and once NetApp, but they both had slow performance and a lack of features so we switched.

The first time was easy, as it was a simple design.

We did it in-house.

It's around 250% over 12 months due to the amount of data that we have.

Start with the basic licensing and add upon need. In our market, we need keep the cost of 1TB at less than $1000.

NetApp is better with CIFS and file shares.

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.

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

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.

A new ST VP is significant change introduced with VNX which makes data access considerably fast. Performance is noticeably great as compared to other Celera and Clarion models. SSD are used for caching due to which data reading /writing is quite fast. Database operations are quite fast over this storage with cache and FC channeled connection. It has extremely large and flexible storage size as per the need.

Due to very complex structure and sophisticated architecture, it needs experts for trivial troubleshooting also. It’s bulky and expensive.

We moved from CX with FC/SATA to VNX with SSD, SAS, NL-SAS. Using SSD as Fast Cache (and for VDI boot images) we have seen huge performance gains in certain operations. Our exchange admin reported that db defrag operations that ran for hours per db were now able to complete for all dbs in under 2 hours. We like the Fast Cache and see over 50% of the IOs from the VNX being provided by those two disks.