Navisphere vs. Navisphere Express

Question

Hi Guys,

im seaching for a small document which shows the differences between the 2 editions. Something you find for every Software like SQL, Exchange oder VMware for example here http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html . I want to show a customer the differences in features and maybe some screenshots of the GUI but im not able to find such a document. Can anybody help me with this ?

regards Dave

DanJost · Answer

I experienced much pain and suffering dealing with NaviExpress for some of my customers years ago - in my opinion, pay for the $900 enabler especially if you are going to run VMware. There are too many things that you can't see or configure in NaviExpress. For one, and perhaps this has changed, you could not set the host LUN ID. This is a real problem with VMware. I remember keeping documentation about "what was what" and having to remove ALL of the hosts and re-add them in a specific order to make sure they match, resignaturing LUNs, etc...not really fun stuff to do.

That being said...

Navisphere can be overwhelming for EMC newbies and NaviExpress is very simple to use and almost looks like a host-based RAID controller configuration tool. I found that the FC units with NaviExpress were pretty easy to set up but the iSCSI versions were a little confusing.

tkjoffs · Answer

For the love of all that is holy buy the NaviShpere enabler! Having arrays with both options I can share a few differences:

NaviSphere Express:

Supports Single Controller Units Only.
Static Web Interface, Can make the systems slightly more cumbersome to use.
I have noticed that it can show full DAEs offline when a single disk has failed.
Is very simple; even my 3 year old niece could provision disk. This alone leads to the fact that a lot of detailed configuration options are not there - or at least I have not found them.
- Migration threshold settings on lun creation.
- Option detailed views on the array (expandanble array views).
- Even basic statistics data.
- I am sure there are others.

NaviSphere: Being an enchanced version, you get all the bells and whistles you need (UniSphere is even better - not sure it runs on AX). Supports dual SPs - not single SPs. Trust us when I say unless your 3 year old niece is going to be provisioning your SAN, this is the better option.

kelleg · Answer

If your question has been answered, please remember to mark the question as Answered. glen

thomas_lundersh · Answer

I got some information to compare from another source, here they are:

CLARiiON

Navisphere vs. Navisphere Express

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