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Re: 10.5? Really?

 
David_Tocker
Regular Advisor

10.5? Really?

Since when does:

 

  • Improvements to Remote Copy performance

  • Enhanced Performance Monitor for Fibre Channel enabled storage nodes

HTTP/FTP proxy support for Online Upgrades and customer notifications

 

Mean a new .5 revision in the lefthand world?

 

Where is the TRIM/UNMAP? - SMI-S provider? any actual new features? nope.

 

Really underwhelming release, seems more like a 10.1 to me.. especially considering 10 itself was a bit of a half-baked effort also.

 

 

 

P.S. This thread has been moved from HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage to HP StoreVirtual Storage / LeftHand. - Hp Forum Moderator

 

 

 

Regards.

David Tocker
10 REPLIES 10
Gediminas Vilutis
Frequent Advisor

Re: 10.5? Really?

Ya, new feature set is really really astonishing.

 

But you probably forgot that now it is not lefthand or saniq, now it is storevirtual. I think this change alone is worth new release number :-}

 

Gediminas

TurbinYA
Occasional Advisor

Re: 10.5? Really?

It's really joke! HP laughing at us!

 

UNMAP, ODX, SMI-S, tiering - customers, you don't need that, throw away your StoreVirtual - buy StoreServ. HP, you think it nice joke? 2 years ago LeftHand was nice product, today this is old car in supercar world.

oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: 10.5? Really?

riiight... "performance improvements".... 

 

I don't even know if this should have qualified for an X.X.1 update. 

 

HP, is this a sign that you are done developing this product line and we should start looking elsewhere?  I've been happy with this line, but if this quality is what can be expected from future major releases this line is dead.

David_Tocker
Regular Advisor

Re: 10.5? Really?

Did the upgrade last night - interestingly it was the only upgrade I have done so far on lefthand *cough* storvirtual that has actually had a problem.. failed three or four times and I had to keep re-running the upgrade until all the patches were applied to all the nodes.

 

Luckily no real problems, but it does concern me a little.

 

I think perhaps now that HP have entry level 3par we should accept that they arent going to do anything with the lefthand gear, its probably just going to stay as 'dumb' iscsi storage.

 

Its a bit sad really, i always have been a bit of a champion for lefthand storage but it is just becoming irrelevant - basically everything it does and more can be done for less $ on commodity hardware now - who cares about the quality of the hardware etc when we are scaling out for redundancy anyway...

 

Considering I can do everything storvirtual does (and much much more) for 'free' with 2012 server, I think that our days of using it as a solution are numbered...

 

I may even consider just reloading the existing p4000 g2's that we have with 2012 to get some functionality, the storage sprawl and the inability to reclaim space etc makes the units pretty high maintenance long term if you are trying to use them anywhere near capacity or levage thin provisioning etc. You are screwed if you want to migrate to another CSV on the same cluster and you are using move than 50% of the storage for just one example of inflexablilty there is to be found in these (or other) 'dumb' SANs.

Regards.

David Tocker
Patrick Neuner
Regular Advisor

Re: 10.5? Really?

I second that.

As 10.0, the 10.5 release is more a 9.6, 9.7 release. But I believe, each time HP announces new models, we will see jumping versions. 

 

I share your concerns. I have the same feeling, as 3Par is there, other storage is not so important anymore. As we just started using lefthand not even a year ago, it disappoints me a lot. I can't tell about new features pre 9.5, as we started with 9.5. At least we were told, Trim should come in the future. But Q2 2013, or Q4 2014? Because once announced, and talking about the troubles upgrading to 10 in the beginning, on production systems you most likely have to wait for some patch releases before rolling out with major new features. 

 

When purchasing the Lefthand, they told us about the great Thin Provisioning Feature. Actually we didn't look close enough, no Trim Support, so Thin Provisioning isn't really a feature here. We just calculated storage a couple of weeks ago and are missing 25 % of storage that could be reclaimed. And moving around big VM's.. I don't have to tell anyone what happens. 

 

Also I agree on the storage Feature from Windows 2012. Generally Windows 2012 impressed me, and I am coming from Linux, so not really that easy that Windows can impress me.

 

 

I don't wanna say, Lefthand isn't a good product, but it starts to fall far behind. If today I would look for a new storage solution, most likely we wouldn't make the same decision as we did a year ago. 

 

Thanks

Patrick 

Steve Burkett
Valued Contributor

Re: 10.5? Really?

If they're going to concentrate on the HP 3Par line for their hardware SAN, I'd like to see them turn the Lefthand line in to software only, certify it for use with the current HP ProLiant range and their options, and issue some guideline configurations for typical setups. Then allow the enduser the choice of hardware to run it on.

 

It shouldn't matter if the underlying hardware is a 25 x 10krpm SAS disk equipped DL380 Gen8 running 1GbE or an HP ML310e Gen8 with a pair of HP 3TB G2 ioDrive 2 IO Accelerators and 16Gb FC.

 

And when we get the money to wack in a 10GbE switch we should be able to add an HP 2-port 530T 10GbE Adapter to our nodes without having to pay the trumped up HP Lefthand partnumber prices for fear of invalidating the Warranty/Support. Likewise add a couple of SSD drives to a partially filled server when we can. (In fact, when we bought our orginal P4500 G1's, the HP Pre-Sales techie sold them to us as having this ability; to upgrade the internal components as we like as it's all built on commodity hardware, but this turned out not to be the case.)

 

A pair of DL380 Gen8's with a pair of SSD's, 12 x 10k SAS disks and 12 x SATA Midlines to give three tiers of disk storage in 4U would be pretty cool, especially if you can run all your VM's off those same 4U's.

 

Or is that just the VSA I'm talking about there?

 

oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: 10.5? Really?

thats more or less what the VSA is.  You need a hypervisor on the physical hardware, but I think that is more or less needed so they don't have to worry about dealing with drivers for all systems.

zidtugraz
Frequent Visitor

Re: 10.5? Really?

Hi David,

 

Interestringly, we also had problems upgrading to 10.5. The storage nodes of three management groups were updated successfully, but in two management groups, approx. five storage nodes could not be upgraded at all. The post-qualification tests failed. We opened a case with HP, and the problem was solved quickly. (Solution: Use the support mode in the CMC, which can be configured manually in the preferences file. As far as we understand, in support mode, post-qualification are skipped.)

 

Although many people here are not very happy with LeftHand at the moment, we cannot confirm the concerns:

- After the upgrade to 10.5, the performance has increased. (At least we think so.)

- In a VMware environment, LeftHand is a great solution. Performance is fine, availability/redundancy is great, features are more or less perfect.

- There is a roadmap for LeftHand storage that promises similar features that other HP storage products (de-duplication, etc.).

 

Hence all in all, LeftHand is still a good (but not very "cheap") solution – at least for us :-)

 

 

Best regards

vcdxnz001
New Member

Re: 10.5? Really?

Had success upgrading a couple of the storage systems and then one spat the dummy and lost it's username and password and I've got no idea how to get it back. Storage system still seems to be working and the volumes are still running. I just can't manage it. I also can't continue the upgrades. Any ideas where to go next?