MSA2040 Storage Tiering - possible to create multiple pools?

[rgijsen]

Hi,
We have a MSA02040 running with spinning disks, and I am interested in buying the Automated Storage Tiering license and a few SSD's to beef it up a bit. Currently I have 2 (linear) vdisks on their own set of disks. This is on purpose; I want that data to be seperated for both performance and disaster(recovery) reasons. I know the approach of tiering is conceptual different from linear vdisks but still I want to keep my data seperated in two seperate group of disks.

Now when I read the sparse documentation available on Automated Storage Tiering, it seems you have to create a tiering group and add disk-groups in that. Pretty obvious. However what I am not able to find proper documentation on is if I can create multiple tier groups, each with their own performance (SSD) tier / diskgroup and have the automated storage tiering keep data inside each tier, so if one tier goes bad for whatever reason the other keeps running? Is it even possible at all to have tiering working on multiple tiering groups?

[Cali]

With Firmware GL220 you can set an Affinity.

So you can Set Volumes with low Performance need (for example a Testting Volume) and Volume with high Priority.

But Tiering and all this Stuff does not work with the legacy Linear Volumes.

[rgijsen]

Hi,
thanks for the reply but that's all info we already know and have. The question is wheter or not we are able to create two seperate pools, both with their own archive, standard and performance tiers in it, and have automatic tiering work on each pool seperately so data stored in each pool keeps seperated from each other in terms of actual disks it resides on.

I think it's possible but I cannot find any evidence.

[CalvinZito]

@rgijsen 

If you have a dual controller MSA, you can make a POOL on each controller.  We do not support multiple POOLs on the same controller (except in a failover situation).  I would suggest that you purchase the SSDs (Max 2 per Pool, <4TB) and use the FREE Read-Cache feature.  If that is not enough performance boost you can purchase the PERF Tier License and convert the drives over to a READ/WRITE component.  One thing to be aware of is depending on the workload applied, SSDs may not improve performance.  Sequential workloads will be serviced from the spinning media, random workloads will be serviced from SSD.

Note:  There is no in-box conversion of Linear to Virtual storage.  This is in essence a backup, wipe, replace of the data.

Make sure they are using the best practices on DISK-GROUP creation to maximize the performance.

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/getpdf.aspx/4AA4-6892ENW.pdf

There is a statement in the Best Practices Guide about POOL Balancing across the “2 pools”. And other inferences to 2 pools throughout the document.

In fact to maximize the performance of the array, you NEED to create 2 POOLs.  Each POOL is serviced by one controller, much like creating VDISKs in Linear storage where a VDISK is owned by a controller, all the DISK-GROUPs in a POOL will be serviced by a single controller.

The MSA Auto-Tiering is MUCH simpler than other products.  Here are the basic decision points:

1. What RAID type (RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10)?
2. How many disks?  (see BP Guide for optimal performance)
3. Which POOL?  A or B   (Assuming dual controller)

That’s it.  Based upon the disk characteristics the new DISK-GROUP will either be Performance (SSD),  Standard (10k/15k SAS), Archive (7.2k MDL-SAS).

Hope that helps!