Suggestions wanted on disposition of a retired EVA6000

[Paul Land]

Our EVA is being replaced by another system at another colo. I'm thus faced with the task of finding a new home for it.

The problem is that it appears, at this time, to have the approximate resale value of its weight in sand, considering that SAN technology has made some insanely rapid jumps in the last decade since the EVA platform was released.

The main issue is its capacity per rack U. Our EVA has six shelves and 96 drives totaling about 24TB in raw capacity, and takes up most of a 42U rack, once the controllers, CV server, switches, etc are added.

It's being replaced by a NetApp system with 50% more usable storage that takes up about 10U, is more flexible, faster (the EVA has 2GB FC controllers), and less expensive to maintain. You can buy a lot more storage, for a lot less money, in a much smaller package, with better performance these days.

I'd like to think that someone out there would find this worth purchasing, if only for parts.. but I don't know where, or how, to make it available. And the terms of our existing colo "detachment" say we have to get it out of there or they'll take possession, so I won't have a lot of time to deal with this.

The last thing I want to do is part it out on Ebay.

Any suggestions from the data center veterans in the group?

[Jan Soska]

hello Paul,
we have similar EVA6000 (104 drives, 22TB RAW) and we use it as primary storage for 4 years now and plan do it form 2 more years, it is still fast enough. but in addition we plan buy another Eva4400 to disaster site and create active-active SAN virtualization including 2 sites via HP SVSP.

My sugestion is:
- Eva6000 with your config is still very valuable piece o HW. I'd recomend it as disaster site storage.
- Think of similar storaga virtualization as we plan. I do not tell you use HP SVSP - NetApp has very similar product, or there are even other vendors like IBM (SVC), DataCore (SanMelody/Symphony), FalcoStor NSS... You can gain very vuluable disaster recovery solution with lower costs - as you have EVA and new NetApp as well.
- All good SAN virtualization solutions are compatible with all big storages - so no problem.

I hope it helps.

Jan

[Peter Mattei]

Usually, when we (HP) sell new storage equipment we trade in the storage to replace. You should have asked NetApp ...

BTW, I doubt that the NetApp solution will stay faster than an EVA over time when used as block storage (FC or iSCSI - with the same number of disks) when the array fills up and you take frequent snapshots.

Read yourself in this blog:
- Making Sense of WAFL - http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/datastorage/default.aspx

Our tests have shown that WAFL degrades performance dramatically over time.
Would be curious to hear from you in a while

Cheers
Pete

[chris huys_4]

Hi Paul,

I would keep the eva6000, and put in an host mirror configuration, for youre most important data, with the netapp. At least then you still have at least one enterprise storage diskarray, still available in your datacenter. ;)

Greetz,
Chris
PS. There are no free lunches. You get what you pay for.