EMC AX4 or HP MSA 2324 as ISCSI SAN?

[rmacdonaldnai]

I have recently been tasked with finding a new SAN for our 3 host Dell 2950 ESX3.5 cluster. I currently have a EMC AX150i DP loaded with 8X750GB SATA drives. This unit currently has 25 virtual machines running on it. Ive found that the SATA drives just cannot handle the io the vms are generating. Ive looked at fully populating the AX150 with 4 more 750GB drives but I honestly do not need any more space just performance. Also the cost of the drives are approx $600. Ive decided based on the cost of the drives that it would be in my best interest to put the money i was planning to use on upgrading the AX150 into a new array. Thus my dilema. Ive narrowed my search down to the EMC AX4i dual controller loaded with 12X146GB 15K 3.5" SAS drives or an HP MSA2324i dual controller loaded with 12X146GB 15K 2.5" SAS drives. Both units are coming in within a few grand of each other with warranty so price of the array does not appear to be a driving force. Upgrade costs are a factor though. Pros and cons for units so far are listed below.

AX4i-

Pros -

Familiar Mgmt Interface

EMC reliability

More widely Used

3 Year 24X7 NBD Warranty included with SAN

Cons -

Only 12 drive slots(Shelf is fully populated)

Uses slightly slower 3.5" drives

Maxes out at 60 drives

Cost to add 12 more drives later is $7260 (3k for shelf and 12X$355 for drives)

Requires additional 1U UPS for battery backed cache

MSA -

Pros -

24 drive slots in same 2U form Factor(shelf half populated)

Uses 2.5" SFF Drives which have slightly faster seek times

Maxes out at 99 drives

Cost to add 12 more drives later is $4824 ( 12X$402 for drives)

Persistant cache not vulnerable to battery backing issues

Cons -

Unfamiliar Interface

Not Real Familiar with HP Products other then procurve gear( We are a Dell Shop)

Not as Widely Used

3 Year 9X5 NBD Support extra $758. Or 3 Year 24X7X4 hour onsite $1513.00 extra( not critical as price on both units with warranty are very close)

Everything im looking at it pointing me in the direction of the HP but im just unsure on the reliability of their storage products in comparison to EMC. I may be missing something in the pros and cons so I wanted the community to weigh in on what they would recommend.

Thanks

Rich

[Bunce]

Will be interested to see the responses to this as we are in the same position and looking at the exact same 2 devices..

Out of interest, how are you doing backups / DR? We're looking at also implementing a SAN at our secondary (to be DR) site and the method we use to replicate the data there may well impact on our SAN choice. We'd replicate everything overight and then critical VM's once or twice during the day.

Our current understanding is that the MSA doesn't offer suitable SAN replication and hence we'll stick with esXpress or Veeam replication (which we're happy to do). Currently looking into cost/features offerd by EMC for replication in this scenario..

We're also looking at the MSA DAS option as we only have 2 hosts and don't necessarily see the advantage in iSCSI when the 3GB SAS speed would probably be adequate..

A

[alan_vt]

I'm currently running 5 MSA 2000fc units, with two more 2000i on order. My opinions here are one-sided as I don't have any experience with the EMC products. It's not from a lack of trust in EMC, it's just that we are an HP shop.

The MSA 2012fc has been extremely reliable. I had one unit that was problematic from day 1. Eventually they replaced the whole thing (dual controller, 4 chassis) as support couldn't figure it out. Support did mention that snapshots at the time were causing problem, but this could have been fixed by now. We don't use them so it wasn't an issue. The management interface is pretty intuitive and less buggy with recent versions of firmware.

One point to remember is that if you are using SFF drives the expansion chassis are only JBOD units without their own RAID controllers. If you go with the LFF chassis, they have build in redundant RAID controllers for each chassis. Best practice is the span your vDisks across chassis to benifit from the multiple controllers. This might make the comparisons a little more apples to apples, but I have no idea if the expansion chassis for the EMC have their own RAID controllers or are JBOD.

The majority of our workloads are not super disk intensive and run well. We do run a few DB's against dedicated volumes. I'm happy to help if you have any additional specific questions.

[rmacdonaldnai]

We are currently handling backups with vranger pro and couldnt be happier( Not a fan of the DPP product though) We copy the backups to external hard drives for offsite storage. We have not looked at replication as we only have 2 T1's to the outside which from what i have researched is not sufficient to push the delta changes to our collo.

[MHAV]

I have some CONS for you and the MSA. We recently bought 7 MSA2324FC and do direct connect them with two HP DL380G5.

The MSA has 3 Boxes that can hold 8 Disks each. Within the RAID Configuration you cant put them all togehter and build one large RAID with 24 Disk

The Maximum is DISKS out of two of the 3 Boxes that brings you to a max of 16 Disks per RAID. Plus the documentation is very poor.

If you want to put the MSA in the HP Insight Manager you need to have the latest Version of Insight Manager running (V.5.3).

Regards

Michael Haverbeck

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[rmacdonaldnai]

Thanks for the heads up with the max 16 disk raid set. I don't think that will be a problem for us as I plan on making 2 6 disk Raid5 Sets. Would setting up all 24 disk in a raid set degrade performance as only 1 raid controller could service the set as opposed to 2 12 disk raid sets each on its own controller to load balance?

Thanks so much for the input everyone.

Talked with a storage rep yesterday and he said there is also a 2500 expansion license in order to add a shelf to the AX4 in addition to the cost of the shelf itself. Also snapshotting can also be done via scripting only on that unit. There is no gui.