MSA vs StoreEasy vs StoreVirtual

[jlojlo]

Our company prepare to upgrade the backbone system this year. Plan to buy 2 x SimpliVity 380 Gen10 for the vSphere + a new SAN storage.

1. The storage will solely for the use of store the VM clients. Some of the VMs are for VDI (Citrix).

2. RAID5 or 6 will be use for the disk array

3. Our budget may not enough for use all-flash. We considering hybrid-flash and prefer the storage which allow upgrade to all-flash.

4. Data transfer by fibre or 10GB ethernet (prefer).

5. Expandable. This is crucial as it plan to use at least 5 to 6 years before retire.

6. Our staff operate at 7x24, so it is business critical

I found the SAN storage model at https://www.hpe.com/hk/en/storage/entry-level.html#portfolio. There are "Disk Enclosures" and "Nimble Flash" too. Which model is best suite to our requirement?

[ThanhDatVo]

It all depends on what you need and what the budget is.

A combination of Simplivity nodes and a new SAN seems odd to me.
I'd choose either a regular SAN setup (regular servers + SAN) or Simplivity only.

Also, you lose a lot of capacity by only chosing 2 Simplivity nodes. (3 Simplivity nodes without a SAN would most likely be more cost efficient then 2 Simplivity nodes + SAN)

I recently upgraded our infrastructure with 3 new ESX hosts + SAN (the new Nimble hybrid flash generation)
I'd have to say i'm very impressed with Nimble and very happy with my choice.

Simplivity was also on my radar for a while but decided to go for a Nimble SAN due to the flexibility in the future and it's also slightly cheaper. (Once you start with Simplivity, you'll pretty much have to stick with Simplivity in the future)

[oikjn]

simplivity is a hyper-convered solution and includes its own "SAN"  It wouldn't make sense to get an external SAN AND simplivity.  That being said, I believe the back-end on the simplivity is the storevirtual solution.  In an ideal world a three-node cluster is definitely better than a two-node one when considering failover/mainteance into the equation, but budget generally makes sense to stay with a two-node solution.  

[jlojlo]

Thanks for the explanation. I thought Simplivity was a server model like ProLiant. I found the ProLiant price list at https://www.hpe.com/us/en/product-catalog/servers/proliant-servers/pip.models.hpe-proliant-dl380-gen10-server.1010026818.html. Better if anyone can provide me the price list of Simplivity. Then I can draft a comparsion table for my supervisor.

I currently using 2 x ProLiant DL380 G7 + 1 x P2000 G3 MSA. Since only 1 storage. It can easily become single point of failure.  I'm thinking below combinations:

1. 2 x ProLiant DL380 G10 + Nimble Flash

2. 3 x Simplivity 380 G10

Many things still remain uncertain such as

1. If choose option 1. The model of SAN. Is Nimble the best choice? What about MSA, StoreEasy, StoreVirtual?

2. If choose option 2. The migration from old to new system between 2 different models (ProLiant to Simplivity).

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi,

Technically seen a Simplivity solution is indeed a Proliant DL380 Gen10 server preloaded with the Simplivity Omnistack software. Difference with the StoreVirtual VSA solution is that you can buy the hardware and software separately, where the Simplivity solution is all-in-one.

That makes it also more complicated to give you a price (there is no price list of the components as such) since I will need to know the type of CPU, amount of memory and desired capacity before I can give you a price of a Simplivity  node... See the available models at this moment in the attachment, from my blog www.bitcon.be where you can find a lot of information on Simplivity and other HPE gear.

In your situation you could go on with the latest generation of MSA 2050, which is a good solution, however Nimble is the way to go since it has a much better software integration, higher performance and availability, and will give you a better user experience after all.

Most of my customers however (being in your situation as well, 2 or 3 servers with a small SAN behind it) migrate to Simplivity. Don't worry about the migration, users won't even notice it, since it is a migration on VMware level from 1 datastore to another...

Kr,

Bart

[regi_p]

Hi you have PE