topic Re: va 7400 in Disk Enclosures

va 7400

Rafael Noas_1 — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 13:45:04 GMT

Hi Gurus!

I have two questions:

1- Are the disks 2GB?
2- Is capable of "remote mirror"?

thanks in advance.

Re: va 7400

Eugeny Brychkov — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 13:53:59 GMT

Hello Rafael,
- VA7400 can not have 2GB disks inside (smallest are 18G disks), but 2GB LUN can be created;
- remote mirror I guess you mean mirror using OS-level mirroring? If yes, then you can mirror LUNs, but it's useless because this task is implemented in VA already at firmware level. If you mean VA-to-VA mirroring, then you can set-up it at OS level (mirroring LUNs in different VAs).
Eugeny

Re: va 7400

Rafael Noas_1 — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 14:01:47 GMT

I'm sorry I wanted to said 2GB/s, and about the mirror mean a VA-2-VA mirror without any OS intervention.

Thanks.

Re: va 7400

Eugeny Brychkov — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 14:15:24 GMT

Rafael, I saw VA making 40-60MBytes/s (in fabric) and as I know there's no software/hardware to setup VA-2-VA mirror. Use XP if you want site-2-site mirroring :-) or OS capabiities.
Eugeny

Re: va 7400

Eugeny Brychkov — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 14:19:37 GMT

If you mean 2Gbit/s front-end FC connection VA is supporting it with a number of switches. Popular used is Brocade's B3800 (B2400 and B2800 are not capable of 2GBit/s, they are only 1Gbit/s)
Eugeny

Re: va 7400

Rafael Noas_1 — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 14:30:08 GMT

Thanks Eugeny,

ok with the mirror question. Now back to the disks, are the disks "dual fc" as are on the xp like this?

--+----+----+-----
HDD HDD HDD
--+----+----+-----

Thanks.

Re: va 7400

Eugeny Brychkov — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 15:43:15 GMT

yes, exactly. There are 2 private loops inside VA (backend loops) formed by two controllers in VA main enclosure. Disks at odd slots are in Redundancy Group 1 (RG1) and by default owned by controller 1 (C1), disks in even slots are in RG2 and owned by C2. If controller fails another controller takes ownership of all disks. There's internal bus between VA controllers which allows to access LUNs owned by another controller. Of course, the preferred path for created LUNs within RG1 lies through it's default owner C1, and for LUNs within RG trough C2. That's brief explanation. Almost all parts/paths are redundant. Non-redundant part is backplane, which has no active electronic components.
The speed I mentioned in previous reply is for 1Gbit/s connection, and peak throughtput I saw was ~90MB/s (comparing to theoretical throughtput 100MB/s with "8/10" FC protocol).
Eugeny

Re: va 7400

Roger_22 — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 17:44:20 GMT

For the 7400 the disks are 2Gb/s capable but they run at 1Gb/s. The 7410 runs the disks at 2Gb/s. Both are 2Gb/s front end capable.

The VA does not provide VA to VA mirroring. The SV3000 http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/products/virtualization_appliances/network/sv3000/index.html provides this capability. Check it out.

Re: va 7400

Bart Paulusse — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 10:43:47 GMT

We're using VA 7400 mirrored over two sites but mirroring is done using Logical Volume Manager.