P4500 TRIM/DISCARD support

[Cadonline]

Any News on this?
We are running into serious Troubles with our Lefthands as Thin Provisioned Volumes grow and grow and grow because the lack of Discard!

[Jitun]

Patience gets rewarded...
Cant say much more. ;)

[oikjn]

oh that would be such a relief.  I can't wait, but I hope they include SMI-S support and some integration with the storage services of windows 2012, but that might just be a dream.

[Patrick Neuner]

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@Jitun wrote:
Patience gets rewarded...
Cant say much more. ;)

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Half a year later ...

[oikjn]

lol

its getting sad.  

[Patrick Neuner]

Right now this is getting a serious problem for us.
On our Servers we habe 2TB used Space (4,6TB assigned; 2TB used) - which eats up over 9TB on our LH Storage. So our P4500 is nearly filled up by 100% ...
Only thing we can do is move the Partitions to newly created Volumes - but they soon will fill up again ...

So if there is no discard/trim support in the very near future it seems we need to drop HP SAN and look for an alternative which supports it ... :-/

I don't like that - as we were always very satisfied with HP - but I don't see another solution at the moment ...

Andreas Schnederle-Wagner

[oikjn]

Hope you get that to the right ears over there.  I'm too small of a fish to make any difference to them when I say that.  In the meantime, what is your actual usage?  Can you move your high churn data to isolated smaller LUNs and your lower movement stuff to other drives?  that way you can limit the amount of thin LUNs that actually expand out to their full size.  That was how I managed to get a bit of control on our thin provisioning LUN expansion rates.  I also have to monitor it just in case something grows too quickly so I can move everything off that LUN and onto another thin LUN while I still have the space...  its a PITA, but it keeps our allocation where we want it.

[Patrick Neuner]

We are using our P4500 for Web-Hosting (Virtual Hosts and Shared Hosts) - unfortunately we can not make the Volumes smaller - as they need to be the size we sell the VHosts to our Customers ...

I just had a Phone-Call from HP Support (DAMIAN IVANOV) because of a Support Request on this issue (Case ID: #4647850281) - and HP Support (DAMIAN IVANOV) told me clearly that Lefthand Engeneering !!! IS CURRENTLY NOT !!! working on DISCARD funtionality nor will it come in the foreseeable future ... !!!

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Support Case answer:
*** PHONE LOG 3/24/2014 (M/D/Y) 2:23 PM CET-1CEST AT [UTC +1:00] WIDEN_DAMIAN_IVANOV Action Type: Outgoing call

Talked to the customer. There is no official info on this if he got that info from 3rd party / sales team he should contact them.
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He suggested to move to 3PAR Storage ...

Seems like we're left out in the rain!!

Andreas Schnederle-Wagner

[oikjn]

that sucks x2.  Not sure the workaround there.  what exactly are you selling here?  do they see the LUN or are they just getting a VM w/ virtual disks?  What hypervisor?  I"m using hyper-v and what I did was move any vhd files which caused thin volume expansion to a set of LUNs where I assume they were expaned to 100% capacity for thin provisioning.  Then I moved the other disks to LUNs where I assumed I wanted to keep them compacted and any time their compaction rate goes down too far, I create a new LUN, migrate the vhd files to that.  Then when I have the old expanded LUN empty, I shrink it to 1GB and then re-expand it to make it "thin" again.  As long as I can keep enough space available for one extra LUN, I don't have an issue...  this isn't idea, but I viewed it as a nice temporary solution.  This this isn't temporary as your support response seems to suggest, I too will be migrating to a non-HP solution next year.  Its a shame since this product used to be so good and now it sounds like its just getting left behind.

[Patrick Neuner]

alright - seems like the Support Guy was not knowing what he was speaking about ...

I had the chance to speak with Brad Katz (HP WorldWide Product Manager StoreVirtual) ... sounds way better than the Support Rep. statement ...

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Hi Andreas,

The support person was incorrect if they said no one is working on this. The UNMAP feature is being actively worked as a high priority by our development team and we expect to deliver this feature to our customers this year.

Thanks,
Brad
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Looking forward for the UNMAP Feature ... ;-)

Andreas Schnederle-Wagner