Licensing and drive options for DL380 G4?

[Bobby Gillette]

We have a spare HP DL380 G4 that we're contemplating throwing SAN/iQ on with 6 drives, just curious if anyone has recently purchased licensing or knows a ballpark figure on the cost.

I'm thinking we can at least put 500GB drives in there to add some additional space to one of our clusters to give us some breathing room in the short-term.

All questions I'd ask our HP rep, but he's out of the office until June 1 :)

[Steven Clementi]

Last I heard... (and this could be totally wrong)... is that HP is not selling SAN/iQ for you to put on your own server.

You either buy the SAN/iQ box (a Proliant Server Appliance) or you get a virtual machine appliance.


Steven

[Gauche]

That's right, you can't buy a license to run SAN/iQ bare metal / native on that box anymore. But you can get a VSA and run it on there to accomplish the same thing. I'd suggest using the free version of ESXi to make it possible at the cheapest cost.

[teledata]

Be aware - if you intend to use the VSA to augment your existing Lefthand cluster there are some gotchas:

Each storage node in the cluster should really be the same performance and the same capacity. Just like in a hardware RAID, in the Lefthand network RAID your cluster is made up of modules, but you would get the effect of lowest common denominator of both capacity and performance.

A better use may be to use the VSA on the DL380 and move some existing volumes that need less performance (the VSA will perform below that of a dedicated NSM)

If you have several older boxes to populate drives with you may consider buying the remote office solution pack. The licensed VSAs could allow you to create a TIER 2/3 storage cluster that would allow integration with your primary production cluster for remote IP copy, and volume migration.