June 17, 2013 at 10:15HP entry-level storage upgrade
In June 2013, the next release of new products from HP in storage systems was held.
This time, the Entry level segment in data storage systems was touched - the new MSA 2040 model was announced.
There are about 30 million small businesses in the world that are experiencing difficulties with current storage systems and who need high-performance arrays at affordable prices, for this audience degrees and the announcement is calculated.
This is already the 4th generation of arrays that have proven themselves as entry-level systems with wide functionality and serious scalability.
What changed?
The name has changed - now the array is called HP MSA 2040. The P2000 G3 arrays will be available for order for another year.
The performance of the array controllers has grown - now each controller has a 4GB cache on DDR3 fast memory.
There is support for SSD drives, now systems support MLC drives 200 GB, 400 GB, 800 GB. The disks are equipped with a wear warning system, which allows predicting the replacement of a failed disk. The media has an extended service life of 5 years, each disk has 30,000 rewriting cycles, in addition, the DWPD (Data Write Per Day) parameter of the medium is 10 times its capacity per day. The amount of recorded data on a 400 GB medium for 5 years will be 7 PB. The minimum number of disks per system is 4, one mirror pair per controller.
For MSA 2040, performance compared to the third generation for random loads increased 2.8 times on reading, for sequential loads - 4.1 times (for sequential writing). The user can now count on values between 50,000 and 80,000 IOPs.
Fig. 1 Comparison of the performance of existing storage systems (left) with MSA 2040 (right) for various loads.
It should be noted that to obtain such performance you do not need to add a large number of spindles, this can be done by adding several SSD media, which affects the cost of the solution for the better side.
Ports with higher bandwidth were also added: models with FC 16Gb, FC 8Gb ports were initially available, by the end of the year combo controllers with FC / 10Gb and SAS 12Gb streams would be announced.
The number of supported SFF SAS disks has increased - the array can expand to 199 SFF disks, while the number of LFF disks remains the same - 96.
The possibility of an upgrade has remained - MSA G3 controllers can be replaced with new generation models, while existing shelves can be cascaded to new controllers, but new types of disks will be supported in 6G SAS shelves.
In addition to the above, the following microcode updates claim support for thin volumes (Thin Provisioning) and data tearing (LUN tiering).
The advanced functionality for copying data (replication, snapshots) has been fully preserved; when installing the array, these licenses are activated for 60 days and 64 snapshots for free, then you can buy an extended license for 512 copies.
The array supports management directly from Windows Server 2012 through the Windows Standards-based Storage Management Service (SMI-S), which greatly simplifies the work in small enterprises where the Windows environment dominates. The following functions are supported through SMI-S: Storage Pools, Virtual Disks, Mapping, Shanshots / Clones.
Fig. 2 MSA 2040 array control panel from Windows Server 2012.
The environment for the application of the new generation of arrays is virtualization, OLTP, sequential load, databases (SSD for indexing / TempDB).
References:
Quickspecs MSA 2040
This time, the Entry level segment in data storage systems was touched - the new MSA 2040 model was announced.
There are about 30 million small businesses in the world that are experiencing difficulties with current storage systems and who need high-performance arrays at affordable prices, for this audience degrees and the announcement is calculated.
This is already the 4th generation of arrays that have proven themselves as entry-level systems with wide functionality and serious scalability.
What changed?
The name has changed - now the array is called HP MSA 2040. The P2000 G3 arrays will be available for order for another year.
The performance of the array controllers has grown - now each controller has a 4GB cache on DDR3 fast memory.
There is support for SSD drives, now systems support MLC drives 200 GB, 400 GB, 800 GB. The disks are equipped with a wear warning system, which allows predicting the replacement of a failed disk. The media has an extended service life of 5 years, each disk has 30,000 rewriting cycles, in addition, the DWPD (Data Write Per Day) parameter of the medium is 10 times its capacity per day. The amount of recorded data on a 400 GB medium for 5 years will be 7 PB. The minimum number of disks per system is 4, one mirror pair per controller.
For MSA 2040, performance compared to the third generation for random loads increased 2.8 times on reading, for sequential loads - 4.1 times (for sequential writing). The user can now count on values between 50,000 and 80,000 IOPs.
Fig. 1 Comparison of the performance of existing storage systems (left) with MSA 2040 (right) for various loads.
It should be noted that to obtain such performance you do not need to add a large number of spindles, this can be done by adding several SSD media, which affects the cost of the solution for the better side.
Ports with higher bandwidth were also added: models with FC 16Gb, FC 8Gb ports were initially available, by the end of the year combo controllers with FC / 10Gb and SAS 12Gb streams would be announced.
The number of supported SFF SAS disks has increased - the array can expand to 199 SFF disks, while the number of LFF disks remains the same - 96.
The possibility of an upgrade has remained - MSA G3 controllers can be replaced with new generation models, while existing shelves can be cascaded to new controllers, but new types of disks will be supported in 6G SAS shelves.
In addition to the above, the following microcode updates claim support for thin volumes (Thin Provisioning) and data tearing (LUN tiering).
The advanced functionality for copying data (replication, snapshots) has been fully preserved; when installing the array, these licenses are activated for 60 days and 64 snapshots for free, then you can buy an extended license for 512 copies.
The array supports management directly from Windows Server 2012 through the Windows Standards-based Storage Management Service (SMI-S), which greatly simplifies the work in small enterprises where the Windows environment dominates. The following functions are supported through SMI-S: Storage Pools, Virtual Disks, Mapping, Shanshots / Clones.
Fig. 2 MSA 2040 array control panel from Windows Server 2012.
The environment for the application of the new generation of arrays is virtualization, OLTP, sequential load, databases (SSD for indexing / TempDB).
References:
Quickspecs MSA 2040