Upgrade from CS500 to AF .....?

[rosenstand69]

Hi all

At the moment, I got an CS500 running at my production site.

I'm looking into upgrading this CS500 unit to an AF .... unit, and then move my CS500 to my secondary site, where I will make an failover setup.

But looking into the AF serie of SAN, i'm not sure if I should go for an AF1000 or AF3000.

My capacity of CS500 are of 72TB raw, 45TB usable, and where I at the moment are using 25TB of capacity.

But would the best upgrade be an AF1000, and how big disc capacity, or is an AF3000 the better way to go.

This Investment would be to support our business, for the next 3 years, so I need some capacity to work with.

Over the last year, I can added around 12TB of disk usage onto the Nimble unit.

We are running FC on the Nimble, and my new servers supports FC 16Gbit.

Any advice you guys can give me?

Thanks

//Rosenstand 

[chris24]

Hello Allen,

You are approaching this from the wrong angle, it's not capacity that you use to size arrays but performance, like for like you are looking at a AF3000, your sales team are the best and most qualified people to answer this question.

If you need assistance getting the contact details of your sales team send an email into support who can find your representative.

Many thanks,

Chris

[pbitpro96]

Agreed that there is no capacity difference between the AF1000 and AF3000 at this scale. What IOPS are you pulling? Do you expect this to go up over the next 5 years?

If you are pulling just 10-20k IOPS on that CS500, that AF1000 is a SHARP little box. Get a 20TB raw AF1000, let dedupe do it's thing, and grow as needed!

[jharris-itguy16]

Another consideration when sizing and AFA.... The AF1000 is rated for 35,000 IOPs with 4KB blocks in a mixed read and write scenario.  Depending, on the kind of workload you are running your IOPs may be well below this threshold, Let's say 10,000 IOPS.  However, you may be utilizing larger than 4KB block sizes (e.g. 8K for Windows, 64KB for SQL, 128KB for database backups, etc), So, even though the sizing looks correct from an IOPs perspective, your workload actually requires more throughput than the array can handle.  Using the 10,000 IOPs scenario, with 4KB blocks is only 40,000 KB/s of throughput.  Compare this to a 64KB block size, where the same 10,000 IOPs is 640,000 KB/s of throughput. That is a big difference.  The tricky thing about this is that most workloads have mixed block sizes and the throughput varies significantly.  Fortunately, you  are already running a Nimble array and have the reporting from InfoSight to determine how much throughput and IOPs you need for your AFA.  Look at this numbers and give your local sales team a call.  They can help you size the new array in short order, and show you the numbers to backup their configuration right from InfoSight.

[jleonardini58]

The AF-1000 is woefully underpowered .  Your CS-500 would run rings around it.  CASL does not get it's performance from  the storage media, it gets it from the CPU and RAM, and the AF-1000 is way under specification. It's a one lung piece of crap that will disappoint you.  CS-3000 is the minimum anyone should even consider, or just buy a CS.  

Appropriate upgrade to a CS-500 is an AF or CS-5000. Any thing lesser will underperform compared to what you aleady have.  Dedupe will make it worse.

[Jacob_Wilde]

Well said, I would also throw in what kind of data you have on your array will also play heavily into sizing as far as capacity goes, lots of VMware (or any virtualization) will drive up your dedupe savings from the OS volumes potentially saving you a couple TB and maybe offsetting some future growth. The other thing I would suggest is since the AF series arrays have two banks for SSDs try to size the array initially so that you only fill one bank, then when you need to expand capacity you can do so with only having to buy SSDs to populate the other bank thus saving on the cost of the expansion shelf itself.

[wvanhoolst45]

So you have already a CS500 then all the comments on performance are right. What you need to do is check your array in InfoSight. See how much CPU resources are needed from you CS500. Keep in mind that system can do around 90.000 IOPS. Don't replace this with an AF1000 or AF3000 when your CPU% is around 50% or more. The AF3000 will deliver you only 50.000 IOPS. So a safer bet would be to go for a AF5000 (120.000 IOPS) unless your actual CPU load is far from the limits of your CS500.

Please review this with your actual Nimble reseller or Nimble System Engineer, they can help you with the sizing.

[rosenstand69]

Hi all

Thanks for all of your feedback on this matter.

Right now I am waiting to get an quote for an AF3000, as well as an explanation of why this model would be the right choice.

So for now, I just have to wait

Have an great weekend all.

Thanks

[anofsinger41]

This is a little disheartening to read after Nimble sold us an AF-1000.

[scott_lysne]

Adam,

  I'm the guy you need to chat with.  I'd be happy to help.  Shoot me an email at scott.lysne@hpe.com.  let's talk Monday.

cheers,

Scott