Pros & Cons Between Va7410 & MA8000

[Justo Exposito]

Hi Gurus,

We are checking the posibilities to change our FC60 disk Array by a new storage cabinet with 2TB. The posibilities are MA8000 or VA7410 as SAN.
We have a two nodes N-CLASS with Service Guard.
Which of those do you recommend me and why?
We are running Siebel with an Oracle Database in this cluster and we need a 24x7 system because this is a call-center.

Thanks a lot,

Justo.

P.S. This thread has been moved from Network Attached Storage (NAS) (Enterprise) to Disk Array - HP Forums moderator

[Vincent Fleming · Accepted solution]

The VA7410 is a newer design - about a year old. The MA8000 is a few years old now. The new model is the EVA.

You would get better performance from the VA7410 then the MA8000, as the VA has faster processors, more cache, and Fibre Channel drives.

A fairer comparison would be VA7410 and EVA. The EVA has performance equal to or better than the VA7410.

Also, in my opinion, the software drivers for HP-UX are more solid with the VA7410 than the MA8000 or EVA, but I am sure this will change over time.

I'm not sure about "official" MC/ServiceGuard support of the MA8000 (ie: certified by our ServiceGuard folks)... some of that testing is still in progress, and the SG website seems to be down this morning, so I'm having trouble looking it up.

The big question is do you want AutoRAID or traditional RAID? The VA7410 is an AutoRAID device, and the EVA is more traditional (it's virtualized, but it doesn't do AutoRAID).

The EVA is also has a slightly higher availability rating, as it has some additional fault tolerant features.

I hope this helps!

Good luck!

[Justo Exposito]

Thanks Vincent.

Justo.

[Justo Exposito]

Hi Again Vincent,

Do you know where to find a manual or information about the posibilities and basic knowledge for virtual arrays, autorraid etc...?
(Something like differences, features, posibilities etc...)

Many thanks in advance.

Justo.

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Justo,
main HP storage page is http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/arraysystems.html ;
More info on VA7410 http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/products/disk_arrays/midrange/va7410/infolibrary/index.html ;
More info on EVA http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/enterprise/documentation.html
Eugeny