topic VA Alternatives in Disk Enclosures

VA Alternatives

Stuart Urquhart — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 08:40:02 GMT

Two questions :-

1) We currently run two VA7400s and have in the past six months experienced an unaccetable number of problems - largely hangs due to marginal hardware. We've found HP support less than adequate. Anybody experiencing similar problems ?

2) We're now keen to move off of the VA platform and are looking to XP or EMC. Any horror stories to share there ?

Cheers,

Stuart

Re: VA Alternatives

Alexander M. Ermes — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 09:02:05 GMT

Hi there.
Could this be something ?

http://www.emc.com/products/systems/clariion.jsp

Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes

Re: VA Alternatives

Massimo Bianchi — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:12:54 GMT

Hi,
As suggested by Alexander, you can think of Clarion .

Remember that VA is a middle-range storage, and is paragonable (only as class) to Clarion.

XP and EMC frames are high-end storage system, with higher costs, benefits, performances.

VA, EVA, Clarion are middle range storage.

It mostly depends on:
- expandibility, present and future
- money
- performance
- additional capabilities (flashcopy/business copy/snapshot/remote replication/timefinder... all mixed up !)
- remote managing

I have no fear story with EMC, XP, or even IBM shark.
I always found well with them.

I used 3/4 VA, but with no problem, just performance here and there. No experience with Clarion, till now, expected October :)

Massimo

Re: VA Alternatives

Claudiu Schmidt — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 12:41:12 GMT

Hi Stuart,

well we have 2 VA at our site, one was replaced during an escalation where we lost all of our data, and the second i hope will be replaced because of very bad host io performance when a disk fails.wait on io rate is 100% during rebuild or balancing.
We tested alternatives, because VA has a very bad image at the moment, and found the 2 systems Clariion and EVA.
Clariion and EVA have similar performance, EVA better reading, Clarrion better writting.
Management is different: on Clariion you have to do a lot of management, but on EVA you have to rely on controler virtualisation. Because of the bad experiance with virtualisation on VA, we were very cautious with the EVA, but all tests showd a good overall performance during failures.

Rgds,

Claudiu

Re: VA Alternatives

Stuart Urquhart — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 12:57:23 GMT

Alexander,Massimo,

We've spent the morning with EMC, who are suggesting the DMX/800

I think we're looking to the EMC/XP solution as a single replacement for the two VAs we have and, having also had performance probs with the VA, we're looking for higher performance.

We've rejected the EVA largely on the grounds that's it was only recently SG certified, and according to what we've heard, the eva business copy equivalent can't be run from the command line.

Thanks for the comments so far.

Re: VA Alternatives

Alexander M. Ermes — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 05:01:17 GMT

Hi, Stuart.
If you have performance problems, look at this :

EMC Symmetrix 8530
- 4 GB cache
- 4 FC connections

We run a machine like this with 1.3 TB disk space and still can boost it up if possible.
We run Oracle Applications on it without performace problems.
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes

Re: VA Alternatives

Marino Meloni_1 — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 06:09:04 GMT

hi,
take in mind that EVA is not an evolution of VA, but a totaly different product, comming from PmCPQ, VA came from PmHP, so totaly different engeneering.
marino

Re: VA Alternatives

Claudiu Schmidt — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 09:54:43 GMT

Hi,

we had the CX600 from EMC, and measured the 4-5 times the performance of a VA7400. So performance should not be a issue on Clariion.
You should look at what EMC offers you, but maybe you can get 2 CX600 for the same money as a DMX. An in this case you can use the performance and also the remote mirror.
Mostly it's cheaper to buy 2 boxes with less capacity each, then one box with a big capacity because of the tier model from EMC.

Rgds,

Claudiu

Re: VA Alternatives

blal — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 15:04:07 GMT

Hi

I got VA7400 with 1.5TB of storage space and RAID1.Its observed that performance issues are there with VA configured in RAID5.But with RAID1 and 3 oracle instances (one database is around 200GB)we havent faced any performance problem with VA.

regards
baiju