Left hand compatibilities....

[Rosscooper]

Hi,

we are currently in the process of evaluating different solutions to renew our internal IT server and storage infrastructure. Apart from Dell and IBM offerings we are wondering if there are arguments pro/contra going for either one of the Lefthand Starter SANs or the MSA2000i from HP in combination with a C3000 blade center.

As I see it, the Lefthand SAN is more advanced offering a better upgrade path in the future (I have seen the flash movie on the website) but what does it do better right now compared to the MSA2000i. Especially when comparing management features (LUN Management) or performance.

For instance, the MSA 2000i seems to offer more features ( I can combine different raid levels on one shelf for instance) and can be outfitted with 450GB 15krpm SAS drives manually. The Lefthand SANs on the other hand, seem to be only available in very rigid fixed configurations (Starter SAN, Virtualization SAN) and don´t even seem to offer RAID6, at least I have not found any info on things like raid levels, mixed SAS/SATA drives etc.

Also, in what way are the Starter SANs limited ? They have a Windows Solution Pack for 10 servers included. Does that mean I can only operate 10 servers with a Starter SAN ?

Thanks all for your input and advice !

[Prakash Singh_1]

Hi, 

Below information might help you...

-Raid 6 is supported in all LeftHand P4000 Nodes
-The "SANs" are pre-configured versions of our system that fit many customers, but you can ala cart any configuration you want together if the "SANs" don't fit your profile.
-P4500 nodes do support 450 15K SAS drives, that is what the "Virtualization SAN" comes with too
-You can't mix different drive types in a single 2u chassis, but you can mix different drive types the SAN easily, a common example is a cluster of SAS nodes, and a cluster of SATA nodes in the same SAN.

I hope this answers some of your questions.

[David_Tocker]

Hi Ross.

Yes information is a bit thin on the ground in regards to these units.

The P4000 is more redundant than the MSA2000 - you pretty much have 1-n redundancy across the whole cluster if configured correctly. Raid 6 works well, we use it on all of our units for the extra redundancy.

Performance is great. Comparing to MSA2000 -similar - P4000 can scale further.

For the C3000 you will need at minimum 2 ethernet switches in the chassis for any form of performance/redundancy. You will also need to add mezzanine NICs to your blades to make use of the extra switch due to blade-switch mapping.

You should take a look at some of HP's smart bundles for virtualisation - they thend to be fairly well 'sized'

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/solutions/virtualization/virtkit.html

I have to put it out there - System Centre Virtual Machine Manager does -not- integrate with these SAN's at all - so if you are going to be going Hyper-V then you will have to do pretty much everything manually.

Apparently VMware is better for this with the units, but I have not tried it.

I imagine whatever road you go down you are going to find lots of 'gotchas' but at least HP is common enought to break out Google if you need it...