MSA1500 CS and Active/Passive versus Active/Active

[CA926681]

I currently have a MSA1500 CS that has 4 MSA20 cabinets connected to it. It is currently being used in a Windows 2003 environment to provide disk to disk to tape storage which it does very well. Some of the times for the disk to disk writes are getting long and I was wondering if moving to active/active would provide any increase in performance when waited against the work involved in doing the upgrade.

As you can tell, I am very new to the idea of SAN attached storage. I have always used direct attached storage but the SAN was the recommended approach. I would like to know if there are best practice guides or white papers on the advantages of upgrading from Active/Passive to Active/Active so that I can make informed decisions about the upgrade.

Thanks

Greg Pagan

[James Muell]

Theoretically, you might get better performance using the Active Active controllers (fw upgrade req'd). Configuring act-act is a manual process done via the cli. I have played around with act-act but not tested for performance. Remember the MSA platform's controller throughput is only rated at 160mgs/p/sec. It the one component that has not been upgraded. Some performance gains are possible depending on how you have your arrays | disks laid out. HP white paper recommends optimum cfg of 7 disks in an array.
As for the HBA parameter settings, HP used to tweak them specifically for the storage device you were attaching to. If you have a test site to use, you might look into modifying the HBA settings. The only ones I've worked with are the time out values mainly for cluster failovers.

[MEvans_1]

James - you mention an HP white paper on RAID configuration, can you post a link for it?