Alternative to an EVA Storage

[Yaboto]

Hi,

A customer has a central EVA storage. Nowadays the EVA often misbehaves and we have to spend at time more than a day before bringing it up. The customer is looking now for a very cheap solution that would be a standby alternative for the EVA Storage. For example if the EVA crashes again, instead of waiting for the engineers for the whole day to fix the problem before the work resumes, the systems administrators can just restore the previous backup data to a temporary storage area then the main operations can resume in less than 2 hours.
I am looking at a simple scsi storage but the customer is looking for a NAS solution.

Please suggest the best alternatives.


Regards,
Berag

[IBaltay]

Hi,
what EVA are do the customer have? Is he running the latest supported controller firmware? Are the disks firmwares upgraded as well?

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi Berag,

What model EVA is your customer running ?

In my experience they are fairly reliable.

Issues are usually as a result of poor management... for example not replacing disks when they fail, not checking the battery status, etc.

Moving to a simple SCSI solution would appear to be a retrogade step, so it would be useful to know exactly what issues the customer has had...

Cheers,

Rob

[Torsten.]

The conflict is between very stable, very good performance, enough capacity and very cheap...

[Thomas Callahan]

Your EVA shouldn't be crashing often enough for this to be a concern.

What EVA model/firmware are you running?

NAS/Simple SCSI arrays are a huge step down from the EVA, and you might have a difficult time getting the systems back online on that kind of storage, not to mention incurring heavy performance hits more than likely.

Make sure you are backing up and storing your EVA configuration nightly, as this can aid you greatly in coming back from a "disaster" quickly.

Let us know what the situation is, there is more than likely a reason behind your crashes.

[The Brit]

hi Berag,

I guess "... often misbehaves" is a technical term I have come across before, (however I never really understood exactly what it meant).

Perhaps you could give a little more information about what the "misbehavour" is! As has been noted in earlier responses, your EVA should not be causing that big a problem. Useful information would include;

EVA Model and firmware levels
Disk group redundancy settings
Do you have environmental issues?
Description of problem!

Dave.

[rozerdemit]

We are now using LSI SVM StoreAge Virtualisation Management for different storage arrays. This technology (i feel that it could be similar to DataCore solution) could bridge different storages with different technologies (in our case are these items HP MSA 1000 and Nexsan SATA Blade). We are limited by these older technology and we cannot expand with VMWare virtualisation until we improve I/O of SAN. Second limiting factor is the lack of expandability of old MSA 1000 field. That is why we consider about EVA 6600 (and not EVA 4400 that is closed to expansions) and that is why we consider about competetive products in the field of data arrays.

[Tom O'Toole]

This is a very poorly formulated problem statement. You haven't given any details about anything. Buying a "very cheap" solution doesn't make any sense if you already have EVA storage that SHOULD be fairly reliable. At first glance it sounds like things are mismanaged, but since no infomration is provided, its hard to say anything substantive.