EVA 4400 (xcs 09501000)

[John McF]

G'day All

I too have experienced "All of the above". Have 4 4400's, 2 x 2c4d with 48 450's, a 2c8d with 48 450's and a 2c8d with 64 450's and 32 1tb's

Today a 2c4d 09004000 array locked up solid. Restart fixed it, after HP was consulted :) I will upgrade tis this weekend

8 weeks ago the biggest spec one did the same, also 09004000, over a 1 week period the array was unmanageable in CV (Dk grey icon) but as I didn't need to change anything I just left it as is until an restart opportunity arose - ran fine. As hosts were restarted they could not re-attach to presented luns from teh array. Post restart it was upgraded to 09006000. Have had single port failures every week since - all drive firmwares are the latest. I have ignored these errors as after a number of hours the sp failure resolves itself and I'm tired of changing out drives that to all intents are serviceable

Yesterday I upgraded to 09521000 a 2c4d with 48 450's, was smooth and no issue occured. pgraded abm/tbm today. I staged this array and CV upgrade through the standby CV svr - so it was in isolation to our production env. This was a pre prod upgrade, so I could mess around with impunity. CV was smooth and promptly upgraded Prod CV svr and resumed all array ops under this machine.

Default 1st disk group is created as a "Basic" disk group - no vraid6. You cant upgrade from basic to enhanced(vraid6). Until another disk group is created you cant delete the default DG - so if you initialise/upgrade into 09521000 then your DG's it would appear will be "basic". Disks are ungrouped singularly so if you want vraid6 then you may be a little frustrated after ungrouping a sizeable number of disks or having a small basic DG of 8 disks and all others placed into another DG - Unless HP has a trick on how to get around this "Any offers Mr HP?" Read the manuals and help screens couldn't see anything.

All problems aside the 4400's are a fantastic performer, even with 4gb of cache. Our large spec device has 3 very active Oracle E-Business Dev and Test suites installed - Solaris hosts on FC disk group (Payroll, HR, Finance, Inventory, OIM etc), New Linux environent Oracle installs on FATA disk group. 7Tb of WMWare farm - complete Win2K8 AD upgrade project and Exchange 2007 upgrade with Symn EV. New SQL Cluster implementation etc etc

I haven't tuned for perf, I run a mix of vraid 1 and 5 vdisks in all DG's. Typical Iops ranger from 2500-9500 and total Mbs is quite normal to see 400's. The solaris hosts, with ZFS and HP Data Protector, backups are fantastic. During backups its quite normal to see 150-200Mbs prefetch and similar Cache read hits when the job kicks off and is sustained, and this is whilst they are runnnig batch jobs with up to 1K write Iops and 20-70 Mbps.

I made it clear to our developers, who always wanted the capacity that this implemetnation was never going to be a performance environment, however it quite happily out performs our EVA8K's

We are going to happily upgrade to 09521000 as the impact from random array events that park services is too much to stay where we are and run the risk that the planets line up

If this XCS turns to crud then we will park the arrays and consider another vendor for our serious Tier 1/2 requirements.

Now to figure out the compat matrix for CV9.1 and Data Protector 6.1 and Storage Essnetials 6.1 Sp1 and HP SIM and RSA and WEBES and MPIO DSM and ........... Now thats real hard work when compared to a few XCS issues :)

Cheers
John

[CLEB]

@Denz

Not quite. I did disable/enable on the switch port where the controller host port was connected. This changed the reporting status in CV from unknown back to 4Gb/s.

I did not physically move any connection.

@John McF

I use DP6.1 also, only restriction is with ZDB integration I believe. CV 9.1 is not supported, you must use CV 9.01

[Denz]

@John Mcf

Thanks for your inputs and overall experience with the EVA 4400. I agree that the performance is quite well for us as well. It just so happen that this connectivity issue between the CV and the EVA storage system is really getting irritating because all our monitoring (evaperf and WEBES) depends on CV. Anyways, it appears that I'll get the go signal for a downtime before the end of the month in order to upgrade the firmware(s), CV, WEBES, etc. I'll leave the compatibility check with HP :)

[morrisosu]

Does anyone have the download location for XCS 09521000? Or has it been suspended?

[Torsten.]

Get it from http://software.hp.com instructions from http://www.hp.com/bsc -> manuals -> storage systems

[morrisosu]

That is where I usually check, under "Storage and NAS", however I do not see the XCS 09521000 for the EVA4400 listed. Maybe I am just missing it...

[Torsten.]

This should be the link:

http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=T4256-63124

but currently I get

Sorry, we are unable to process your request. Our system is experiencing some difficulties. Please try again later.

[Uwe Zessin]

Even the direct link does not work any longer:

http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=T4256-63124

gives the usual: ""Sorry, we are unable to process your request. Our system is experiencing some difficulties. Please try again later.""

Of course that proves nothing, because:

http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=BAD-INTERFACE

guess what the response is?
""Sorry, we are unable to process your request. Our system is experiencing some difficulties. Please try again later.""

[morrisosu]

Interesting, I get the same thing. So you guys think it has been pulled?

[Torsten.]

Docs are still there:

Release notes:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/CoreRedirect.jsp?redirectReason=DocIndexPDF&prodSeriesId=3664763&targetPage=http%3A%2F%2Fbizsupport2.austin.hp.com%2Fbc%2Fdocs%2Fsupport%2FSupportManual%2Fc01836895%2Fc01836895.pdf

update guide:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/CoreRedirect.jsp?redirectReason=DocIndexPDF&prodSeriesId=3664763&targetPage=http%3A%2F%2Fbizsupport2.austin.hp.com%2Fbc%2Fdocs%2Fsupport%2FSupportManual%2Fc01846362%2Fc01846362.pdf

all from http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=101&prodClassId=-1&contentType=SupportManual&docIndexId=64255&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=3664763