MSA1000 Best Practices

[BR636104]

We are just purchasing our first MSA1000s and want to understand how best to set up the disks, arrays and logical disks. We have four servers - two SQL, one exchange and two File. I've two dedicated 2 disk RAID1 arrays on Shelf 1, Bus 0 & 1 and on Shelves 2 & 3 on bus 2 & 3. Two RAID5s that are striped down and across all three shelves - one array is 12 x 15k 72Gb and the other is 10 x 10k 145Gb. The 72Gb array has three logicals - 2 x SQL and 1 x Exchange and the 145 Gb array has two 650 Gb logicals for the file servers. Does this repesent best practice?

[Uwe Zessin]

Hey, that sounds pretty reasonable. I guess you have put multiple logical disks into one disk array in order to save parity space which would be 'wasted' if you used multiple, smaller disk array with one logical disk each.

[CA817443]

Mike,

The disk configuration sounds fine. I think what you're really asking for is configuration best practices for the SAN in general - this would include the SAN switches as well as the MSA1000. I am not familiar with the MSA1000; I have HSG80's. Here are my recommendations based on experience and educated guesses!!

1. If at all possible, setup a test environment. While HP makes everything sound easy, it rarely is. I have lost data because I couldn't test things out.

2. Zone based on OS. Even if you anticipate only using Windows, zone. Once you put it in, everyone is going to want to use it.

3. Get a SAN appliance. While you can manage the SAN by ver, very careful documentation the appliance makes management much more reliable and easier to plan with. In my mind a must - that's coming from a person without an appliance :-((

4. You didn't mention it, but an absolute must is to have dual-redundancy at the MSA1000 - dual controllers.

5. Get agreement on a standard downtime schedule. Keeping your SAN up-to-date is very important. If you can't get the downtime schedule, it makes the testing environment critical so that you can test the upgrade procedures online with systems up.

HTH,

Spike

[BR636104]

Maybe I should has said - the MSA1000 is to supliment two of our EVAs so the SAN is well established and we're trying to setup the MSA1000 in our lab so we can test, test, test! We just want to make sure we are following best practice cause I shure as hell can't find anyting on the HP site that deals with this specific issue on the MSA.

Thanks for the input guy's!

Mike