EVA4400 or P4000 G2? Getting conflicting advice, your thoughts?

[John O'Neill_6]

Hi All,

I'm lookng at upgrading our storage, here's my set up at present.

2 x HP DL360's with 32GB each
1 x HP X1800 Storage server running iSCSI

So far everything seems to be working fine, but I need to virtualise more servers and am looking to now move to a dedicated SAN (though the X1800 has performed OK so far, it's iSCSI software can struggle under load).

I've got two HP Re-sellers quoting up a solution, one is based on using an EVA4400, the other is looking at the P4000 G2.

I need about 4TB of usable disk space, I need reliability, ease of management and most of all I need robustness.

All up I will need to support about 20 VM's and eventually want to deploy virtual desktops within the business, so the SAN we choose needs to be able to handle potential growth and increased workload in future years.

The P4000 will use iSCSI and the EVA 4400 will be using FC.

What do people here think? Some people tell me that the EVA4400 is near end of life and best to go with something newer, others tell me that they're quite solid.

Then i'm told by other people that FC is old hat and that we should all be on iSCSI, so I thought i'd post here.

What do you guys / girls think? Both seem to have advantages and disadvantages.

Interested in hearing from people who've used one or both of these or other SAN solutions.

Thanks.

-John

[Cajuntank MS]

I am in the process of doing basically the same thing. I am converting all of my physical servers into virtual machines running under Hyper-V clusters. I to looked at both technologies and decided on the P4000 series product. I have played some with FC and with it's expense, it would have been to hard a "pill to swallow" compared to that of iSCSI (I'm a K-12 school district, so money is always tight). I purchased two of the starter SAN kits, one kit being 15K SAS drive based to hold my OS volumes, and the other kit was was based on the 7.2K SAS drive (more capacity) to hold my data volumes.

There are volumes of information on iSCSI vs Fiber Channel. This was a good read just from a quick google search.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-explosion/fibre-channel-vs-iscsi-the-war-continues-806?page=0,1

FYI. The 4500 series also gives you a license for HP's VSA (virtual SAN appliance) which lets you utilize existing hardware and storage as a SAN for up to 10TB.

[Jos Panen]

Well, I would not buy an EVA4400 because there will be a new EVA out soon. I also have the feeling that HP doesn't put lots of effort in new features for the EVA. There is still no VAAI support and if you use VMware it is a basic requirement for any new storagedevice.

If you buy a P4000: the performance stands or falls with the network. Watch out on this!

[John O'Neill_6]

Thanks for the replies, from what i'm reading across the 'net and here in various ITRC threads, it seems that the EVA4400 is a much disliked appliance.

Why do so many people dislike the EVA4400? Is it just a badly designed unit?

Do you have any details on a likely replacement for the EVA4400?

Thanks.

-John

[Daniel.L]

If what you want is Reliability and ease of mgmt, go for EVA.

If you are eager for experienceing some new Storage functions & technologies. Try P4000G2 - It can give you almost everything(Storage cluster, Network Raid, Snap & Clone, Thin provisioning, Remote copy...), it is full of FUN.

[Jos Panen]

I don't dislike the EVA4400. When we bought two EVA's 3 years ago they were featurecomplete for us. Now they are outdated (FC <> SAS, ...). This is the reason why EVA will introduce new EVA's.

[john_eco]

If you are moving to FC then I would suggest EMC. We moved from P4000 units to the EMC AX-4 FC system with an extra shelf of drives. Since then we added a 3rd shelf of drives and have about 14TB's of usable space. The P4000's are good units but limited in how they can be configured. If you have rack space and don't need to carve out specific LUN configurations to supply multiple databases, then the P series is probably ok. If you are going to need to configure different sets of spindles and have multiple RAID configs, then move to a more robust unit, it's worth the extra cost. Good luck and have a 3rd party that carries different systems and not slanted to one or the other help you with the purchase. Also figure for 3yrs out as to what kind of and about how much storage you will need. Happy hunting!

[Rob Crooks]

I don't know why the EVA4400 is so badly looked upon, I have 2 and find them pretty amazing. With 2 shelves and 300Gb drives you will have over 4Tb of useable space. As for the price of FC vs iSCSI, yes, you have to buy a switch (only if you have more than one node to connect) and a SAN card or two, but performance wise you never have to worry.
If you wanted to go with cheaper drives, you could buy some SATA and only one shelf, but wouldn't suggest this for databases.
If you need any DR/DT, add Continuous Access and another EVA4400 and replicate your data.
All in all, the EVA is an Enterprise array at a workgroup price.