HP EVA4400 Performance and stability

[Eric Delaet]

Hello,

A couple of months ago we bought 2 new EVA 4400 systems. We already had quite some problems with it:

- Disappearing paths (recently fixed in newest firmware)
- Magically disappearing mirrorred LUN on the DR site (suddenly mirrorring to "Unexisting disk"), without notice or warning.
- Resetting controller under heavy load

We also have serious performance issues. During tests, my old storage (R5 7x10k FC) performs better than my EVA (48x 15k FC Vraid1). During tests, I removed the data replication groups completely. To be sure the storage is the cause, I did a bitwise copy of the filesystem on the LUN to ensure the situation is the same and I used the same server for testing.

HP Support is currently on it, but I'm curious to know if there are similar experiences with the EVA4400.

Thanks.

[shIVinator.]

First things I would check out would be that the LUNs are balanced across both controllers. I hope that would have been one of the first things that HP looked at as well. From EVAPerf CLI you can tell if they are by using the following command:
evaperf hps -cont

Remember that all disks in the same DR group MUST go over the same controller.

Other things to look at:

How is the destination EVA configured? Are you using FATA drives or slower FC drives?

What is the link between the two sites?

Is MPIO set up properly? Are you using the proper load balancing?

Regards,
Duane

[Víctor Cespón]

There's a new firmware for FC 15K drives and FATA drives:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?swItem=co-71198-1

Also there's a new 0950xxxx firmware in development for the controller and I/O modules that will solve many problems detected on the last 6 months.

[Eric Delaet]

Hi,

Thanks for the replies!

At the moment, I'm having these performance issues and my DR site is not connected to make sure this is not the problem. I'm working only on my main site (48x15kFC) now, the replication groups are removed.

However, to answer the questions: the DR site is equipped with lower cost FATA drives, the EVAs are directly connected with 8Gb Fibre. MPIO is working.

It's interesting though that you said that all disks in the same DR group MUST go over the same controller. Do I have to force this somewhere?

Our EVA & disks were upgraded last month to the latest firmware version by an HP Engineer.