HP and EMC

[Sreejith Kaliyam]

Hi all,

We have a SAN with EMC disk array and Brocade 3900 switches. We plan to hook HP EVA to the setup. We have HPUX, W2K and solaris clients. Have the following questions

1) Can we connect EMC and HP arrays to the same SAN ??

2) Do we need to do zoning for the same ??

3) Do we need seperate Fibre channel controllers to access EMC disk array and HP disk array ??

4) If we use HP securepath, is it going to affect the existing setup with EMC ?? ( currently there is no multipathing softwares installed in the servers)


Thanks

Naveen

[Chris Vail]

1) Yes
2) Yes: this is not a big deal.
3) Not really sure what your question is. Each host needs its own fiber adapter (FA) to attach to the SAN, of course. But several of these can be attached to a single EMC HBA (host bus adapter). This is called "fan out", and refers to the ratio of FA/HBA. EMC actually recommends a 1:1 ratio, but 8:1 is supported. That means that a single HBA can connect up to 8 FA's. Note that Sun and Windows boxes CANNOT connect to the same HBA that an HP does. This is because, as Ray Noorda stated "Thats the nice thing about standards: there are so many to choose from.". HP uses a different protocol for fiber than does everyone else. So don't plan on any kind of sharing between W$/Sun & HP systems.
4) I strongly urge you to license EMC's powerpath. Its a better product.

Chris

[Peter Mattei]

3. Yes definitely!
4. PowerPath cannot coexist on the same server with any other IO path failover SW like SecurePath. For the EVA you need SecurePath if you want more than just one path!

I suggest you have a look at the "SAN design reference guide" and other documents on http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/san/documentation.html
Chapter 4 talks about heterogeneous SANs.

Cheers
Peter

[Vincent Fleming]

1. Sure
2. No, but it's a good idea.
3. Since you're not using PowerPath, you should be able to use SecurePath and access both the EMC Luns (without path redundancy via SecurePath) and the EVA LUNs (with path redundancy) using the same HBAs... as long as they are HP HBAs - they have to be supported with SecurePath. It's not a bad idea to have seperate HBAs for the EMC and EVA... it would simplify support issues.
4. It shouldn't.

Good luck!

Vince

[Zeev Schultz]

I would overall strongly check HBA compatibility issues.We got an issue
with hp hba not supporting fabric with
EMC symmetrix 38x.Sun use jni,so I'd check
these too.
Brocade,btw,has on www.brocade.com HBAs support
matrix.So do HP & EMC.

Zeev