HP storage blade

[Igor Karasik]

Hi,

I have two questions about storage for blade systems

1) Is HP StorageWorks SB40c storage blade
supports the cascading of shelves ?
(we need about 1 Tb of storage, i.e. we need more than 6 SAS drives)

2) Is HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array 50 Enclosure can be connected to blade servers in any way?

Thanks, Igor

[marius402 · Accepted solution]

Igor,

1) No, only SB40 DAS storage available at this stage. Shared storage planned for near future.

2) No, there is no interface for the MSA50 to connect to a SAN or directly to the C-Class Chassis

My advice, see if you can hang on until September, expecting everything to change then

Cheers

Marius

[Igor Karasik]

Marius, thanks for the answer !

>>My advice, see if you can hang on until September, expecting everything to change then

What kind of changes we can expect in September ? cascading of SB40c storage ?

>>Shared storage planned for near future.
We don't need shared storage, we need directly attached storage with capacity about 1 Tb.

[Adrian Clint]

Igor,

You can only connect 1 SB40 to 1 blade. So you can't cascade them.

In the future I believe there will be another storage blade that can be cascadable that more than one blade can use. (The SAN blade).

Looks like your only option is a blade with a mezzanine HBA, a FC Pass-thru and an MSA1000.

Or if you dont need the 1GB to be contiguous and can manage the content to fit a size barrier...

Use a BL480 full height blade with the PCIe mezz card to connect to a SB40c. Fit 4x 146 in the Blade and config as RAID5. Partition this as 20GB for the boot partition and 400GB as partition B.
Partition 6x146GB in the SB40c as RAID5 and get 700GB as partition C.

Using the OS mount B as a subdirectory of C or vice versa and get 1.1TB.

[Oleg Koroz]

re: Looks like your only option is a blade ...

add iSCSI

Using the iSCSI protocol, systems
can connect to remote storage and use it as a physical disk although the remote storage provider, or â target,â
may actually be providing â virtualâ physical disks.

[Igor Karasik]

What about performance in case of Blade + iSCSI ? vs. Proliant DL360+ SmartArray+MSA50 for example ?
Cost of blade + iSCSI is much higher ....

For many years we used Proliant ML/DL servers
(since Proliant 1200 in 1998.....). But in government tender finished month ago (we are government agency) IBM win in not-blades category and HP win in blades category.
Therefore we check now option to buy HP blades or IBM x3550/x3560 severs.
Currently we need to upgrade our FileNet application servers in 6 remote offices (storage space needs from 700 Gb till 1.6 Tb depend on office)

BTW: When I checked IBM x3550 + EXP-3000 DAS I surprised that IBM still don't have 2.5" 15k SAS drives for servers and don't have 2.5" SAS drives for external storage at all. Also, maximum memory for IBM MegaRaid controller (SmartArray analogue) is 256 Mb...

[Oleg Koroz]

Igor, true enough â ¦ local attachment is less costly compare to iSCSI; I brought iSCSI as an example what could be done with blades. I'm not sure if HP offers any fiber-to-SCSI bridge devices, compatible with MSA50?
Do you already own MSA50 or it more pre-sale Question? Check options provided from MSA1510i.
Also I found one of the documents that might give you some ideas for performance
http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/downloads/ESRP_SoltnBrief_MSA1510i_Exchange_4000user.pdf
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/disk_storage/msa_diskarrays/san_arrays/msa1510i/index.html

[Igor Karasik]

>>Do you already own MSA50 or it more pre-sale Question?

Pre-sale question. As I wrote before we try to choose between IBM not-blade solution and HP blade solution.

Thanks for links, although I stil doubting about iSCSI performance vs Direct attached storage.

[marius402]

Igor,

iSCSI is slow, don't use for anything but file I/O. On GbE don't expect more than about 50MB/sec sustained throughput.

My recommendation at this point in time would be to use an MSA1000 (or MSA1500) with 7 x 300GB 3.5" disks. The drives are cheaper than SAS with more expansion capabilities (bigger disks and more drive shelves). At a later stage you can deploy the MSA1000 in ILM or mezzanine backup configuration. The downside to this will be that you will need SAN switches etc.

Hope this helps

Thanx

Marius

[Igor Karasik]

Marius, thanks


I am newbie in SAN, so sorry for stupid questions:
-what about SAN storage performance vs. DAS storage ?
- MSA1000 has Fibre Channel host interface, which card I need on Blade server in order to connect Blade to MSA1000 ?
-MSA1000/1500 use SCSI and I am under impression that SCSI is "out of date" now (and 3.5" drives as well).. SAS and 2.5" drives is more modern.. Am I right in thinking ?

>>At a later stage you can deploy the >>MSA1000 in ILM or mezzanine backup configuration

I didn't understand this, can you explain a little more about ?