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HP-UX and Compellent SAN

 
UxBoD
Frequent Advisor

HP-UX and Compellent SAN

Hi,

Do any of you fellow ITRCers have experience of HP-UX 11iV3 with a Compellent SAN ? We were going to purchase a rp8440 and EVA4400 but the above vendor has just been thrown into the mix. I have found very little information about how it interops with HP-UX. Any issues with adaptive I/O ? Boot from SAN ? Performance ?

Any help will be gratefully received with points ;)
1 REPLY 1
Jim Viera
Frequent Advisor

Re: HP-UX and Compellent SAN

We've been running HPUX 11iV2 for the last year and a half on 2 Compellent arrays (41TB total). We've recently installed 5 itanium boxes running 11iV3.

I'll talk about the 11iV2 systems first. The Compellent arrays are not active-active in the sense of both controllers presenting a particular lun path. Therefore, we have had to mirror-ux any critical 11iv2 luns because a failure of a particular controller would not allow for seamless recovery when the other controller takes over etc.

Performance has exceeded our expectations. All of our writes are performed in RAID10 fiber drives and blocks of a particular lun are migrated to RAID5 in the fiber tier and ultimately the SATA tier depending on access characteristics for that particular lun. This is all done at the "block level" not the LUN level. This is all policy driven per lun if need be. Thin provisioning is performed in the array and you don't need any client agent on your server.

Since your asking about 11iV3, I'm glad that HP has finally left it's proprietary ways in regards to LUN addressing. With 11iV3 Agile Addressing, I am now able to see past the 8 lun limit as well native multi-pathing handling the dynamic discovery of additional paths in failover scenarios. (see attachment)

Our environment consists of 11 HPUX servers that are accessing the Compellent arrays.Our HPUX servers host Oracle, PeopleSoft, GIS, and web based applications.

We also have standalone a Window SQL cluster, NAS, and a 6 server ESX farm. There are around 150 VMWare virtual servers that boot from our Compellent arrays. They're running various flavors of Windows, Linux, and Netware.

We also have 2 EVA3000 and 1 EVA4000 arrays. Again, the virtualization and feature set of the Compellent arrays beat the HP EVA line hands down.

One other note, I've upgraded the firmware on both of our Compellent arrays without ANY server downtime. I wish I could say that with the EVA line. I know, I have some older EVA's, but I got tired of waiting for HP's technical reality to match up with their marketing hype.

I hope this helps......