StoreVirtual Storage
1748214 Members
3158 Online
108759 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Re: Performance of 2x P4500's vs. 4 x P4300's for SMB

 
Jeff Roback
Occasional Contributor

Performance of 2x P4500's vs. 4 x P4300's for SMB

In putting together a SAN for a SMB it seems like at the end of the day using enterprise SAS drives, The p4500's have 2x the storage of the P4300's and 2x the price, using1/3 more drives.  So in doing the math for this, it seems like that if you had the budget for a small number of nodes, say 3 P4500's or 6 P4300's, it seems like $ for $ you'd get more IOPS out of the P4300's.  So the only downside would be that you'd top out at 10 nodes sooner.... but if you weren't expecting  to need to grow past this, wouldn't you get better performance from say 6 P4300's than 3 P4500's?  Am I missing something?

 

Jeff

 

 

4 REPLIES 4
oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance of 2x P4500's vs. 4 x P4300's for SMB

I believe you can have up to 16 nodes per management group.  That said, there is nothing too difficult about having a 2nd or 3rd management group.

 

I don't think this is a SMB specific question.  The better decision will depend on what your IOPS and storage needs are as well as latency... 7200RPM can't respond as quick as 1500RPM just like 1500RPM will never be as fast as most SSDs.

Gediminas Vilutis
Frequent Advisor

Re: Performance of 2x P4500's vs. 4 x P4300's for SMB

More points to consider.

 

Regarding space. If you are going to use RAID5 inside of node, P4300 creates one 7+1 RAID group, while P4500 works with 2x 5+1 setup. So in latter case you 'loose' 2 disks from one node versus 1 disk from P4300.

 

Performance wise 6 5+1 RAID5 groups (3 P4500 nodes) outperform 6 7+1 groups (6 P4300 nodes) for sure. 3 4500 nodes will also use less network bandwith for internal cluster data synchronisation

 

But, if you consider P4500 versus P4300, always keep in mind total TCO. 6 P4300 will consume far more electricity than 3 4500 (I would guess about 1.5 times more). In case of G2 it will also use 2x more rack space.

 

Regarding warranty. In case of P4x00 G2 individual nodes have only 1 year warranty, while 'SAN solutions' - 3 years. It is also a little bit cheaper to buy 'SAN solutions' instead of individual nodes. So keep in mind and that.

 

And last point. P4x00 G2 will be end of sale in few months. Look at new G3 P4330 series (1U nodes with 4-8 2.5" 7.2-10 krpm disks). In few weeks new 2U models with 12x3.5" or 25x2.5" disks should be released. Do your math then :)

 

In case of G3 warranty policy changes. There are no more 'SAN solution' packages, nodes can be purchased by 1, each covered with 3 years warranty.

 

Gediminas

Woodc
New Member

Re: Performance of 2x P4500's vs. 4 x P4300's for SMB

I have had both of these at the same time. We have the 4500 internal with the 15k sas drives and the 4300's in our datacenter with 15k sas as well. What we did was add another unit to the 4300 saving money and adding iops. This made a zero difference in the systems performance as the extra drives just add iops. The biggest decision is how you attatch them to the network. we use 10GB/s from the esxi servers for vm datastores and the stock 2x1gbs for each of the 4300's and 4500s all attatched to procurve 2910. we have around 25 servers on each cluster and can't tell a difference in any of them. Just don't forget to add enough nics for your clients and segment all traffic that is chatty from your servers.

 

Hope it helps.

Steve Burkett
Valued Contributor

Re: Performance of 2x P4500's vs. 4 x P4300's for SMB


@Gediminas Vilutis wrote:

And last point. P4x00 G2 will be end of sale in few months. Look at new G3 P4330 series (1U nodes with 4-8 2.5" 7.2-10 krpm disks). In few weeks new 2U models with 12x3.5" or 25x2.5" disks should be released. Do your math then :)

This.  I wouldn't touch the G2 series unless you are getting a real good end-of-sale pricing on them. The G3 platforms built on the HP ProLiant Gen8 platforms are much more capable and modern kit. And future versions of LefthandOS will no doubt not run on G2's at some stage (as happened with the G1's with 10.0).

 

If you really want to go the G2 route on a budget, you could also consider refurbished kit from HP's Renew program, usually a fair discount for perfectly ok kit. (Well ok, one refurb node we got in had a dodgy backplane but they soon swapped that out when the problem became evident)