Question Regarding HPE MSA 2052.

[ohmkorapt]

Hello Everyone,

We will renew our hardware which includes an MSA p2000. On that MSA we configured two RAID 5 with 146 GB HDs and two Hot spares.

At the moment, we have around 2.5 TB Data. 500 GB of that data (databases) would profit from SSDs and the rest can be stored on HDs. We don’t use the Storage as archive, it is only used for virtualization. I don't have a lot of experience in the storage topic. Fist I talked to our Hardware Partner who isn't a storage specialist by himself.

He offered the MSA 2052 with 22 * 900 GB HDs 15K RPM 12GB/s. Connected via direct FC 16GB/s. I guess the configuration would have been the two included SSDs as read cache, two Raid5 with 2 Hot spares. I thought that is a very basic solution and I figured we could built something better. I read some guides, quick specs and best practices of the MSA HPE 2052 and came up with this configuration. With all the information I gathered, I want to use the Auto-Tiering. I want to know if this should work fine or if there are better ways than this. We need to buy the following disks.

• 2* SSD 800 GB 12G (which are included)

• 2* SSD 800 GB 12G

• 9* HD 900 GB 12G 15K RPM

• 7* HD 1.2 TB 12G 10K RPM

The Configuration would be the following disk groups twice.

• 800 GB SSD RAID 1 (Performance)

• 2700 GB fast Disks RAID 5 (Standard)

• 2400 GB slow Disks RAID 5 (Archive)

• One Hot spare for the 900GB disks and one hot spare for the 1.2TB Disks

This would get in two separate auto-tiering virtual Pools. My questions are.

• What do you think of this configuration? Does it make Sense or is it bullshit?

• Has anybody experience with auto-tiering? Should I use it or should I just create a Manual SSD Volume and HD Volume?

• Is it reasonable to connect the servers and the storage with the more expensive Fiber Channel?

• What else do I need to keep an eye on?

Thanks in advance.

[JonPaul]

@ohmkorapt 
First thing I would recommend is to look at the MSA 6th Gen hardware (2062, 2060, 1060) which has been shipping for about 18 months, instead of the 5th Gen (MSA 2052).
A change from your familiar P2000 to the 5th or 6th Gen systems is the change from Linear Storage (RAID sets and volumes on a RAID set) to Virtual storage (Pool of disk groups and volumes belonging to the whole pool).  Looks like you have done some review of the capabilities already.
The tiering engine will determine which tier data resides on,  so if you want all of your database to be guaranteed on SSD drives you will need to create a pool of all SSD and only allocate volumes from that pool to the DB.  In your instance it seems a configuration of 2 Pools, one all SSD and one all HDD, would be optimal.
With the Gen6 you have an additional RAID configuration, MSA-DP+, which resolves a number of limitations with Virtual storage.  Power of 2 disk-group requirement, no incremental expansion, distributed spare capacity vs spare drive.  RAID 5 is generally not recommended in favor of raid levels with higher fault tolerance, ex RAID 6 can sustain 2 simultaneous drive faults.
I would also recommend away from 15k drives.  Capacity is limited (900GB) and the performance gains are minor over 10k when a lot of drives are aggregated. The MSA will put the 15k and 10k drives in the same tier, STANDARD, if they are in the same pool which will limit further any performance improvement gained from the 15k drives.  If you need the speed look to add 960GB SSD either as a read cache for read workloads or as a performance capacity tier for read and write workloads.  The SSDs are are significantly faster with typically a small increase in cost from the 900GB 15k.
If you do not go with the MSA 20x2 remember that to utilize capacity SSD disk groups and HDD disk groups in the same SYSTEM you will need the Advanced Data Services License.
I would recommend looking through the MSA Best Practice guide
https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00105260enw
There is also a Virtual Storage technical guide which gives great techincal detail on how the virtual storage works.
https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00103247enw