HPE MSA 2060 – Optimal DP+ Configuration with 4 Enclosures (24x 2.4TB per Enclosure)

[Markus123456]

Hello everyone,
I'm hoping someone with HPE storage experience can assist.

We've recently acquired an HPE MSA 2060 system with four expansion enclosures. Each enclosure is fully populated with 24 × 2.4 TB 10K SAS HDDs, giving us a total of 96 drives.

Our initial plan was to create two RAID 6 disk groups per pool — one per enclosure — so that each pool would span two enclosures. However, we’ve discovered that RAID 6 on the MSA 2060 is limited to a maximum of 16 drives per disk group, which makes our intended setup unfeasible.

After further research, MSA-DP+ appears to be a more modern and performance-optimized alternative to traditional RAID 6, especially in larger configurations. That brings us to our main question:

For optimal performance and manageability, which of the following configurations would be recommended?

1. Create one DP+ disk group per enclosure (i.e., 24 drives per disk group, 4 groups total), or
2. Create a single DP+ disk group per pool that spans two enclosures (i.e., 48 drives per disk group)?

We're aiming for a good balance between performance, rebuild times, and future expandability.

Any insights, recommendations, or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

With best regards from Germany,
Markus

[giladzzz]

Hi

I would create two DP+ groups each in it's own pool and spanning

2 enclosures.

Regards

[support_s]

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[JonPaul]

@Markus123456 
The recommendation provided by @giladzzz  is a great general purpose configuration.  There are other options.
Just some things to think on:
1. The MSA will only allow up to 2 Pools.  Volumes are carved from the pool, the customer has little influence where the volume data is stored on the pool. eg. if you had SSD and HDD in the same system but wanted certain volumes only on SSD then you would create 1 Pool of all SSD and 1 pool of all HDD.  Not your case currently but future???
2. each pool only allows 4 total MSA-DP+ disk-groups,  so larger MSA-DP+ disk groups are encouraged,  ie. an MSA-DP+ disk-group per enclosure would not be a good idea. 
3. Capacity usage to connected hosts, will you want large 128TiB (140TB) LUNs presented as a single LUN to hosts or more evenly dispersed small LUNs/Volumes.  eg. should you make 1 pool with 72 HDDs in an MSA-DP+ and 24 HDDs in the other pool.

I hope you have seen the MSA 2060 Best Practices guide:  https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00105260enw
And the MSA Gen6 Virtual Storage Technical Guide: https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00103247enw?jumpId=in_psnow_80fc309c-db97-4d36-ab95-04ec7eb4fd3a_gaiw
Both have details on configuration with MSA-DP+

Also, if your current capacity needs are small you could start with a small (min 12) MSA-DP+ disk-group and add/expand with drives later as your needs become more apparent.  Expansion does take some time to rebalance data but the option allows for later configuration.

[Markus123456]

Good morning JonPaul,
first of all, thank you for your detailed response.

1. Coincidentally, my supervisor asked just yesterday whether it would be possible to use SSDs as cache. Is that even possible with the MSA 2060? For example, could I create a disk group with 44 HDDs and 4 SSDs and specifically configure the SSDs to be used as cache?

2. Unfortunately, I can't give you a precise answer to that. Since pool mirroring didn't work, we suddenly have more storage space than expected — definitely a luxury problem.
   We definitely need one volume for the Hyper-V cluster and another one for the file server. Assuming disk group expansion is as seamless as described, then it appears to me that the smartest approach for now would be to create two small disk groups and present each as one large volume.
   Would you agree with that?

Best regards from Germany,
Markus

[JonPaul]

@Markus123456 
The MSA offers a READ-CACHE option,  this does not require an additional license (Advanced Data Services).  The READ-CACHE can be up to 4TB per pool and 1 or 2 drives.
The other option would be a Performance 'capacity' tier.  This adds capacity to the pool and invokes performance tiering (data migrating to the best tier based upon accesses). The MSA tiering process keeps the data accessed the most in the highest possible tier, this means that the SSD tier in most cases will be mostly full at all times and data consistently accessed will remain in this tier and on the drives.  

Disk group expansion is only available with MSA-DP+ (other RAID levels do not allow expansion).  Expansion of the MSA-DP+ disk group can take some time (days), especially as more data has to be moved to rebalance.  So if you start small and build up make sure you are ahead of the capacity expansion.
The configuration you go with is going to be up to you and what makes the most sense.  In small configurations the performance of the system will be limited by the backend storage, the disks, and not the controllers.  Sometimes a single Pool (eg. 1 Disk -group) makes more sense due to the relative simplicity and the reduction in overhead (only 1 set of parity and spare capacity).  

[support_s]

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