Difference between HP EVA4000/6000/8000 & EMC CX700 Storage

[Md. Khairul Alam Prodha_3]

Hi,

We have HP9000 rx5670 HP-UX 11i V2 Cluster Server & VA7110 (73GB*14) Storage with Oracle 9i DB.

We want to upgrade our Storage 2TB Usable space which can upgrade 8TB Useable space.
We need more IOPs, RAID0/1(mirror) & HSP.

Could any one suggest us which storage is suitable and manageable for US?

And diference between EVA4000/6000/8000 & CX700 Storage?

Thanks
Khairul

[generic_1]

I would go with the cx700 with capacity on demand. See if they could turn on all of the disks and give you visibility to luns on the outside of the spindle :). This can be done on some EMC frames I know, but I have not tried it on this model. The biggest thing I think this will give you is control over your data layout on the frame. Plan this carefully with your vendor and I think you will be in good shape. The more disk you use the better. So carve many small luns across the controllers and disks. Dont stripe down the fiber. It will be harder for the EMC guy to do many small Luns across the fibers/controllers, but it is worth the extra few days :). Get the best setup. Add them to your vg and do a stripe with a stripe size of 1024 for oracle. Go fiber not NAS. NAS will kill your database.
The more Disks in your VG and stripe the better your performance.
Good luck

[Mahesh Kumar Malik]

Hi Khairul

The EVA takes advantage of the benefits of Fibre Channel (FC) in distance, performance and connectivity. The use of optical Fibre cabling allows distances between connected segments of a SAN to be up to 500 meters @ 1 Gb/s; 300 meters @ 2 Gb/s using short wave multi-mode cable and up to 10 kilometers (6.21 miles) @ 1 Gb/s when using long wave cable. The EVA8000 with EVA XCS v5.0 is 2 Gb/s enabled on each FC path, but will also support 1 Gb/s FC paths for backwards compatibility. Storage Area Networks (SANs) can be constructed using 8, 16, 32 or 64-port FC switches for fabric connectivity (currently up to a maximum of 20 FC Switches supported).
The EVA8000 can support up to 240 FC disk drives at 2 Gb/s transfer rates.


EMC CX700 with four 3GHz processors and eight back-end Fibre Channel disk ports, the CX700 offers more processing power and higher bandwidth than any competing product. And you get maximum scalability: the CX700 delivers linear disk scalability up to 240 drives with cached performance of 200,000 IOPs and 1520 MB/s.

Looking at above IO performance of EVA8000 is outstanding and is thus recommended

Regards
Mahesh

[Vincent Fleming]

There are several important differences between the CX700 and EVA8000 (the EVA8000 is the comparable model)...

1. CX700 has a standard Intel server design for the controllers
2. CX700 runs Windows XP (!!!) on the controllers
3. CX700 has no hardware accelerators
4. CX700 has no virtualization
5. CX700 runs it's disk paths active/passive

The EVA, by comparison, has a custom-designed controller running a proprietary operating system (which cannot get viruses like Windows XP can), has specialized processors for hardware assist RAID parity generation (and other functions), and implements vitrualization.

An EVA can be set up much more quickly than a CX700 - you can be up and running in just a few hours instead of days.

An EVA runs it's disk paths (backend Fibre Channels) active/active for better performance.

Also, the EVA is *very* easy to manage.

There's no need to do anything really fancy with LVM, since the EVA stripes across the backend disks automatically.

The EVA is pretty similar to the VA7110 that you have today, except that it's MUCH more powerful, expandable, and has many new features.

Good luck,

Vince

[generic_1]

Skip both product lines and go to DMX, symettrix or XP.

[Bill Costigan]

The XP and DMX are not as easy to manage as the eva. One advantage the EVA has over the CX700 is flexibility. With the CX700 you need to define a raid level at the disk group and put physical disks into the group.

Therefore, you can not have a raid 0/1 and raid 5 LUN sharing the same physical disk. I've seen issues where the customer could not use space space on the CX700 for a particular purpose because of the way the cx700 was initially configured.

You can do a lot with the CX but you better know what your future plans will be before starting.

Most of the performance of any array is tied to the number of physical disks. If you plan on having 14 disks, that will be the factor that limits your performance. Not controller, or fiber loops, etc.

The reason the DMX and XPs have such good performance numbers is that they are loaded up with disk during the performance tests.

This is a fair test, if you need 500 disks. The eva's guts are too slow to use 500 disks but the XP can get the maximum performance out ofthat many disks. Therefore the eva cannot be configured with much more than 200 disks while the XP can have over 1000.

However, if you only have 14, 32 or 50 disks, you are paying for a lot of array power that you will NEVER see.