HP storage blade

[aboerup]

I'm a big fan of the MSA1000/1500 product line, very capable equipment at very reasonable prices, fits in really well with blades.

In order to fit an MSA1000 or an MSA1500 (if you need more than 12tb of storage go with the MSA1500) you will bare minimum need the following:

MSA1000 chassis that has one fibre port on the back
SCSI disks for the MSA1000

on the C7000 enclosure you will need
blade brocade 4/12 switch (or 4/24 if you plan on using more than 10 servers)
a qlogic mezzanine card for each server

and one fibre cable to connect the MSA1000 to the brocade 4/12 switch

If you want redundancy you will need to add another brocade switch, a redundant MSA1000 controller + IO module and another cable.

The performance of MSA1000 is very favorable, able to pull off 150mb/s transfers pretty well. If you boot off of a SAN you will see Windows boot faster than ever before :)

[aboerup]

Oh and I forgot to say I have used an MSA1000 and a C-Class system in conjunction. Booted off the MSA1000 (no internal disks or anything!) for 12 systems and performance was very good.

[Igor Karasik]

Hi,
I see information about new HP StorageWorks All-in-One SB600c Storage Blade on HP site.

Can we expect new generation of SB40C with cascading of shelves and shared options ?
Or SB600c is only new storage option ...?

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi Igor,

The SB600c would appear to be a bundle of a blade server with an SB40c storage blade.

Looking at the Q&A pages here:

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/sb600c/qa.html

It doesn't appear that there's any way to cascade shelves.

I've heard it rumoured that there are plans to repackage an EVA into a blade package, which will hopefully allow for storage over 1TB. I'm not sure on timescales though.

Cheers,

Rob

[aboerup]

An EVA in a blade would be pretty nice, just cascade some fiber disk shelves off your integrated Brocade 4/12 or 4/24 and you have storage.

What I think is missing from a really good 'all blade' solution is a full-height tape changer. A single LTO-2 tape drive does not cut it for virtually any scenario where I would look at putting blades in.
In order for me to do a good all-blade solution I need a MSA1000/MSA1500 and a MSL2024 FC. It is a good fit for certain sizes of blade deployments, but is hard to fit in the market segment the C3000 is targeted at.