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Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

 
5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

I was listening to the podcast yesterday regarding the version 11.0 announcement. A 50TB capacity will be available as well as tiered storage for optimizing to flash and SSD. No TRIM/UNMAP yet, but it's on the way according to the announcement.

 

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/Deep-dive-podcast-with-StoreVirtual-VSA-team/ba-p/144459#.UhJ2oKMYl4c

 

66 REPLIES 66
oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

yay!

 

I hope one day they sort out whatever is needed to get unmap to work as thin provisioning volume growth is definitely a long-term problem, but the rest of the things they mention all sound good.  Looking forward to the release.

Sbrown
Valued Contributor

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

so you  have to pay to upgrade your VSA to have storage tiering?

 

seems like this should be free.

 

What's the word? It's almost like they are renaming the product

oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

where did you read that?  The blog post I read did talk about three tiers of licenses...  3/10/50 w/ the 3TB one limited to 3 nodes and no tiering, that kinda implies that the 10TB one (AKA the current solution) includes Tiering....  one thing I"m not clear on is if that tiering is inter-node or intra-node  (IE, will it auto-tier between SATA nodes and SSD nodes or is it a node with SATA and SSD drives attached).

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

How you implement the tiering was my question as well.

 

My initial impression was that you would need to provision a physical disk group on the server raid controller using SSD, SAS, or go with PCIe flash, (whatever your high-performance disks are) then create a virtual disk on that storage and designate it as the high performance tier in the CMC.
 

If above is the case, how does it work if your server uses smart-cache like the p420?Perhaps the two are complimentary?

 

Lot's of questions...

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

If I recall from the podcast, existing VSA licenses will retain the 10TB capacity, but include the auto-tiering.

Sbrown
Valued Contributor

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

so as long as you have valid support you will get free upgrade? What about non-vsa users?

You have this in writing somewhere?

My SE1120 with P420/2gb FBWC is ready! 1.5TB of read ssd caching for raid-5 volume can be reconfigured to do both read/write tiering?

Honestly I'd be more happy if they would come up with host side unified cache design and write-back caching.

ie you are on same node as VSA, you write preferred to VSA local node first. It will ACK then you continue.

Read caching could be done too on host side :)

Also regarding trim, if we had RLE compression wouldn't that take care of unmap/trim? simple zero compression would take of that?

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Some of my support contracts actually expired, but I haven't had any issues downloading updates through the CMC. I think so long as your nodes are licensed or within the evaluation period there shouldn't be any issue upgrading.

In the podcast it was stated that tiering and capacity increases were VSA only features for now.

 

The tiering implementation in 11.0 is a good start, I'd like to see some RAM utilization for cache similar to Nexenta/ZFS in the future. 

 

Since the VSA is software-defined storage I'm not sure how much host-side integration is possible. A DSM equivalent for ESXi would be nice along with better vCenter integration. I would love to have my CMC show up as an extra tab in the vSphere client similar to how the VMWare VSA is integrated.

Sbrown
Valued Contributor

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Well with VSAN and VFLASH announced what do you think of esxi 5.5 versus store virtual?

Seems that for once vmware might hold the upper hand. I really am looking forward to see how that "evacuate" a VSA host feature works.

The main thing that storevirtual had was iscsi so if a node failed, all the hosts connected did not crash (they had no form of CARP/VRRP for their nfs) whereas ISCSI connects to multiple vsa and sustains a storage node failure quite happily.

SCSI_UNMAP support in esxi 5.5 will definitely put the pressure on storevirtual to support trimming!

I think competition is good, it ensures everyone gets the new features they are wanting.

What I'd love to see is a good reliable NAS (nfs/smb) to run on the FOM to dish out multiprotocol with storevirtual. that would be hot. the microsoft smb is good but their nfs is horrible

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Yesterday received the following e-mail:

 

         HP StoreVirtual Storage
Dear HP StoreVirtual Customer,

Thank you for your continued interest in the HP StoreVirtual Storage. Unfortunately, we have reached the maximum number of participants in our Controlled Release for LeftHand OS 11.0. General availability for LeftHand OS 11.0 via Online Upgrades in the StoreVirtual Centralized Management Console is scheduled for mid-November 2013. Again, thank you for registering for this Controlled Release Program.

Thank you for continuing to be a valued HP customer.
HP StoreVirtual Team