Any real world XP 12000 experience?

[Derek_31]

Our company is thinking of buying severl XP 12000s. The EVAs are too unreliable, and we've heard good things about the XP line.

Anyone have the 12Ks and if so, what is your experience?

[Hemanth Gurunath Basrur]

Derek,

Refer to the foll. links for info:

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2004/040907a.html

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/storageworks/Sep04DMGXP12000note.pdf

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/xp12000/index.html

Regards,
Hemanth

[Derek_31]

I appreciate the links, but I was looking for real XP12K users and their personal experience with the array. Does it live up to all the hype?

[Colin Topliss]

Hi,

We've just put one in - and the *very* first thing we had to do was get a firmware upgrade - and we needed to wait for the upgrade *before* the array was formatted (else we wouldn't have been able to apply the upgrade later).

I'm just about to start using it in anger over the next few weeks - so if anything else turns up I'll post back on this thread.

I'll dig out the firmware rev too.

[Derek_31]

Cool...I'm very interested in your experiences with it.

[Alzhy]

I will soon have although I've had experiences with the real McCoys (Hitachi HDS 9960, 9980 -- equiv. to the XP512 and XP1024). Based on my readings of the various documentation available - management and functionality is practically the same - except for that new kool thing - External Storage virtualization.

We're in the same boat as you - migrating from EVA5K's to this XP12K mainly for reliability and scalability reasons. The XP12K *should* be faster and scale better - due to its bigger cache capacity, 16 loops per ACP versus 8 for the XP1024 and of course that ability to virtualize (as LUNs) most enterprise arrays out there.

Reliability? It's tops in the industry and has phone home features. A HDS engineer will just show up with replacement disks/cards without us even noticing anything on the connected servers. And with the XP12K - you don't ever have to shut down your enterprise to do firmware/code updates -- so basically it's a run forever array!

Performance-wise, I will still implement storage layouts in the same fashion as what we do on the 512/1024 - and that is host based stripes of the already RAIDed LUNs - making sure the members are spread out symmetrically amongst the ACP's and array groups - and use VxVM to carve out even higher performing storage units on the connected servers.