topic Re: store virtual 4730 in StoreVirtual Storage

store virtual 4730

phillbl1 — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:38:41 GMT

hi,

i am looking at buying a store virtual 4730 with 25 disks fully populated for use with vmware.

my experience with store virtual is that you purchase in pairs to allow network raid across the nodes. we only want to purchase one (they cost a bit!) to start with so i assume that you can do the usual raid 10, 5 & 6 configs and present the iscsi luns to servers etc.

is purchasing one ok and and using the standard raid, maybe later we can then add another and start looking at network raid.

thanks

P.S. This thread has been moved from Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Small and Medium Business) to HP StoreVirtual Storage / LeftHand. - Hp Forum MOderator

Re: store virtual 4730

David_Tocker — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 22:43:56 GMT

Hi Phil.

It absolutely is possible - however you will get some best practices issues alerts in the console.

Remember, adding a second unit will not gain you any capacity (it will gain performance and redundancy however) and if you are only using a single node it would be best to use RAID 6 instead of 5 for the increased redundancy is the case of multiple drive failures.

Thanks.

David.

Re: store virtual 4730

oikjn — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 21:28:58 GMT

what david said. I would add that I think it would be a mistake to buy just ONE unit because then you have to worry about experiancing disruptive firmaware updates. Get two units at a minimum or you will regret it. From that point forward, you do NOT have to make future purchases in pairs, IE you can have a cluster of three nodes without a problem and you get the benefit of adding storage and performance. Just remember that each unit you get only gives you about 50% effective capacity increase (if you get a 10TB unit, it will only add 5TB to your available net capacity after network raid 10).

Re: store virtual 4730

phillbl1 — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 21:39:47 GMT

hi,

thanks for the reply. i understand that normally you would purchase 2 nodes but thats not very cheap and costs comes into at some point.

we would have to use raid 10 on two nodes which would cost us the mirror pair of the cluster.... to get raid 5 and more storage would then require a third node from to acheive this.

i suppose it could be worth looking into two nodes and instead of fully populating with 25 i could look at putting 12 drive in each node. the units are normally the cheap parts but the disks are what drives the price up.

thanks