EMC VNXe

The EMC VNXe 3300 is targeted to be a low-end / SMB / branch office type array.

These two documents would definitely have been useful to read before we bought the array

• http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h8276-emc-vnxe-high-availability.pdf
• http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h8178-vnxe-storage-systems-wp.pdf

Some things that are rather surprising (even in a low end system) in the current build (2.1.0.14097):

• NL-SAS disks can only be configured in a (4+2) RAID6 configuration
• By default, hot spares are not configured when you create a RAID6 storage pool.  In fact, when you manually create a Hot Spare Pool, the wizard tries to talk you out of it.
• When the failed drive is replaced, the rebuilt data on the hot spare is copied back to the replaced disk.  I guess this isn't surprising for people more familiar with EMC.
• While VMware is one of the target audiences, there is no support for VAAI.
• You can't grow or otherwise resize a LUN.
• You can't remap a LUN to a different 'Storage Server' (e.g. move the primary SP of a LUN to the other SP).
• Maximum LUN size is 1.999TB
• The only performance information you get via the GUI is for the SP and that is CPU load, network activity and disk activity.