MSA1500 A/A

[John Kufrovich]

If anyone has any problems, please let me know.

[andy steven]

Hi John

Is there any best practice for ESX?? should it ESX users update or is it not supported

many thanks

[John Kufrovich]

Andy,
Let me ping a couple of individuals on my team and I'll get back with you.

[John Kufrovich]

Sorry for taking so long.

The vmare support is lagging. You can expect some kind of support in a few weeks. Unclear which FW versions at the moment.

[Fabian_Nowee]

John,

Is it possible to use both the MSA and EVA on one machine?

e.g. storage server in combination with entry/midrange/hi-end storage provisioning.

Does all work with 1 MPIO solution, is it a mattter of installing the DSM modules?

Thanks,

[John Kufrovich]

Hey Fabian,

I was just going to write you an email today. I haven't heard of any issues running EVA and MSA on the same server. Just get the appropriate DSM for the storage arrays.

With your MSA20 LUNs increase your stripe size to 64K for Raid 5 and 6. You should see an improvement in overall MSA performance.

jk

[Lars Funck Jensen_1]

>>John Kufrovich wrote:
>>If anyone has any problems, please let me know.

Does not (yet ?) work on OpenVMS - Alpha and/or Integrity.

Any new info about this ?

/lars

[Basil Vizgin]

John, can you look into problem of Sergey N Tkachuk in this thread?
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=211267&admit=-682735245+1166292783179+28353475

Thank you!

[Muhammad Shamroze]

John, can u help me out...as Im new to this MSA1500, As I want to configure two node cluster on win 2003 and the shared storage is MSA1500 with MSA30 enclosure and I have to assign drives to MSA1500 and the cluster is active passive cluster so what are steps to assign the drive to MSA1500 ...or how to configure drive in MSA1500?

[John Kufrovich]

If you are using ACU (Array Configuration Utility). Always set SSP (Selective Storage Presentation. Set the profile setting to the appropriate OS. Assign the same LUNs for both nodes. The MSA user guide is a great place to get acquinted. There should be a couple of Whitepapers on the website that helps with Cluster setup. Let me see if I can locate them.

Please properly size your disks for the application. Don't expect performance for a 200 mail users on a 3 disk LUN. Or create multiple LUNs using the same disk array. running a couple DBs. The MSA has plenty of performance when properly configured.

[Simon O'Hara]

I'm having with slow read speeds during backups etc. Write/restore speeds are fine and dandy but the read speeds about half if not less of what they should be.

I've attached my tech_support output.Any ideas?

Regards

Simon

[John Kufrovich]

Simon
Just need a couple of more bits of information.

At the MSA cli, >show preferred_path

Did you set any preferred paths for your any LUNs using HBA FFMPIO?

jk

[Simon O'Hara]

Here you go....

show preferred_path

Controller 1 (this_controller) is the current optimal path for these units:
None
Controller 2 (other_controller) is the current optimal path for these units:
0,1,2,3,4,5
Implicit (automatic load-based) LUN ownership changes are currently ENABLED.

Don't know if any preferred paths were set up on the HBA's as our supplier set it all up. How would I check this out. Running HPUX 11.11 on the 3 boxes the SAN is connected to.

Regards

Simon

[John Kufrovich]

Guess I should have looked at the profiles before my last response.

HPUX, isn't my strongest OS. Does autopath have the option of load balancing the HBAs?

[Uwe Zessin]

The current version of Secure Path for active / active storage arrays (formerly known as 'Autopath') does support dynamic load balancing across all paths and over multiple Fibre Channel Adapters, at least on EVA.

[Andrew_346]

John,

I am looking into the MSA1500cs to replace a current configuration of direct-attached SCSI. Right now we have 3 MSA30 shelves attached to SA6402 Controllers in a DL585G1. We purchased a new 585G2 to build a new production system at another site, but I failed to notice the abhorrent lack of PCI-X slots in the 585G2.

At this point, I need to find hard-core performance numbers to compare DAS to an MSA1500cs controlling 3 MSA30 arrays. Also, which controller(s) would you suggest to connect the 585G2 to the MSA1500 for highest redundancy and performance?

It really sucks that I'm going to have to shuck out another $10-15K just because of a few PCI slots... I want to make sure it's going to be a much better solution.

[Muhammad Shamroze]

Hye John,
Could help me out as I want to configure zoning b/w MSA1500 with 4 host servers that is DL380 G4, each host have two HBA's and MSA1500 have 14 drives on one enclosure and 2 on another enclusure, so i need any manual or documentation, how to configure zoning b/w MSA1500 and host servers ...one thing more to add that we have 2 brocade switches to communicate with....

Waiting for reply

[John Kufrovich]

Andrew,
You should be able to add the EM module to your SA6402 ->SA6404. This will allow you two more SCSI Shelves.

The storage industry is notorious for touting numbers marketing numbers.

PCI-X 64b/133Mhz = 1GB/s,
U320 = 320MB/s
U160 = 160MB/s
FC HBA 2Gb = 200MB/s

The GB/s or MB/s numbers represent BANDWIDTH. This is a measure of the capacity of a communications channel. The higher a channel's bandwidth, the more information it can carry. The more devices sharing that bandwidth, the more likely hood of a bottleneck.

I wouldn't purchase a SAN just for attaching a single server. The beauty of SAN's, is to allow for centralized storage, clustering and a few more items.

In some situations the SA6xxx will be faster than the MSA1500. It really depends on your intended application.

jk

[John Kufrovich]

Muhammad,

The brocade user manual should help you on zoning your switch.

If your SAN only consist of 4 servers, two switches and a MSA1500, you shouldn't need to zone your switches. If you have a tape library, then consider zoning the library.

Make sure you have your ACL(SSP) setup on the MSA.

jk

[Andrew_346]

Thanks John.

Currently, I have the MSA30's configured as dual-bus with two connections to each 6402. So even with 6404's I'd still only have one controller in the system and only be able to support 2 MSA30 shelves.

I think I may have to look at the new MSA60 with the P800 controllers. SAS 15K may be the only way to go. I just lose two spindles per box. May have to use 4 boxes...

[John Kufrovich]

Andrew,

SAS would be the better option. There are two form factors, 2.5" and the 3.5".

You would gain drive space if you used the new MSA70. This enclosure uses the same 2.5" drives as the MSA60. You go from MSA60 12 drives to MSA70 25 drives.

[Basil Vizgin]

John, MSA60 uses 12 3.5" drives in 2U, MSA70--25 2.5" drives (SFF drives as in MSA50) in 2U.
Andrew, even you lose two spindles per box, don't forget that MSA30 is 3U box and MSA60 is 2U box.

Happy New Year, folks!:)

[John Kufrovich]

It's to early to think without the JAVA.

I was thinking MSA50. Thanks for catching it.

jk

[Andrew_346]

MSA70, I didn't even see that on Friday. Only problem is the SFF drives are still limited to 10k. With heavy random I/O in my OLTP DB, I need the speed of 15k... So the MSA60 would have to be the case. And yes, four of those boxes would have the same footprint as the MSA30 with 6 more drives.

When we tried to use the MSA50 with 10k drives, we had such a horribly slow time to restore the database onto the new drives. We even had engineering working on the problem with no resolution. I assumed it was RPM that was the problem. So I assume that 15k SAS will outperform U320 15k.

[Basil Vizgin]

Andrew, as stated in now revoked quickspeck in near feature 2.5" 36GB will be 15K while 72GB will be 12K:-0