Getting the most total space out of an eva8000

[IBaltay]

>We have 4 loop-back switches right now with >2 eva8000 controllers and 8 disk >enclosures.

its the max for EVA 8000 for the single rack and also for the double rack config, (max disk enclosures for the single rack is 12)

see
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/disk_storage/eva_diskarrays/eva_arrays/index.html

>Any other cables or other accessories >needed?

as spoken there is the following accessories from HP to be used with each enclosure...

http://partsurfer.hp.com/cgi-bin/spi/main?sel_flg=partinfo&template=main&cpric=&ps
rchmode=&partsrch=336881-B21&submit.x=7&submit.y=4

[mujzeptu]

So I only have room for 3 more enclosures in this rack....

There is the two controllers, the 4 loop-backs, the 8 enclosures AND a 1U iscsi kit.

This leaves me with 1U short of space of adding the 4th and 12th total enclosure.

Now, when you move to another rack, what does this mean? Are you just physically putting the new enclosures in another rack? Is there cable length issues and connectivity issues with cabling? Is there anything additional needed to make it work?

With the 4 loop-back switches we'd like to now go up to 12 enclosures, but not sure if having more enclosures in another rack causes new issues or needs...

[Steven Clementi]

The EVA 8x00 is expandable to 18 shelves. !2 in the Controller rack and 6 in an expansion rack. The Expansion rack is a standard HP Rack.

My suggestion is...

... move the iSCSI gateway to anther location to make room for the 12th shelf.


The problem you will run into with having the 12th shelf in another rack is that you will need to either get a longer CAN bus cable, or get a kit to extend the bus into the next rack. The Expansion rack usually sits right next to the EVA rack. The cables are long enough to make it to the backend loop switches if the shelves are right next to the EVA.


Steven

[Tom O'Toole]

The FATA drives are 7200 rpm, and transfer rates are very high, because the density is very high. Anyway 30 users does not sound like a very high load for an eva 8000. It sounds like you are mostly looking to get more data capacity.

As mentioned you will need to buy at least 8 to create a disk group. A small disk group provides less usable space per disk, because of per-disk group overhead, so maybe try to buy more than that, in multiples of 8.

For managing this, you may want to try move less active, but large data to the FATA disk groups vdisks, so less IO/S are done there.