HP/3PAR StoreServ 7000

[sgunelius]

Good morning.  I know the HP/3PAR StoreServ 7000 is relatively new, but HP has reportedly been shipping quite a few, so I was wondering who out in the community is running either the 7200 or 7400 in support of their virtual infrastructure.  We're considering this as a replacement for our aging EVA 6100s and I'm wondering how well this array is handling real workloads.  Thank you in advance for your response.

Scott

[TheITHollow]

You will never want to switch back to your EVA after you use a 3PAR.

I have a P7400 in the lab at work and it's great.  iSCSI and Fibre Connections are a nice addition over an EVA.  The chuklets will make your environment better.

It certainly feels like a huge improvement, but I don't have the statistics to back that up yet.  I know that I'm using lefthand, EVA and 3PAR in the lab and my higher performance stuff goes on that 3PAR.

HP is shipping them now, but there is pretty high demand from what I understand.  I wouldn't be surprised if you have to wait a few weeks before it could be shipped.

[mcowger]

Its worth mentioning that the 7000 is the follow on to the F-class arrays, with newer hardware/software from the V-series.  Its not like the hardware/software they run hasn't been out for a while (and is reasonable stable) - its just new packaging/name.

Its a great replacement for EVA (although, thats not saying too much - EVA was terrible).

[HPstorageGuy]

3PAR is a great option for EVA customers but don't agree that it was terrible - far from it.  There was good reason for it to have over 150,000 of them out there. It was an innovative product when it was introduced 12+ years ago and had many of the same ease of use features that 3PAR has (striping across all drives, no dedicated parity, easy LUN provisioning) - but 3PAR is certainly a better choice now!

I have a couple of things to point you to help:

• Video/podcast I did with analyst from the Taneja group talking about testing they did against a traditional disk array to show that you could double your VM density with HP 3PAR.  Related to that, you probably qualify for the Double Your VM density guarantee we have (link is to the blog posts I have talking about it.
  
• I did the first of a series of ChalkTalks I'll have talking about the special sauce with 3PAR.  You can find the first one here.
  
• I have a ton of other blog posts talking about HP 3PAR that you can check out.
  

Calvin (@HPStorageGuy)

[BenLoveday]

I have to agree with Calvin, the EVA series has been around for a long time and have mostly heard good things about them. I personally have an EVA4400 and a P6300 in our environment and they have been very good. Compared to the newer products out there they are somewhat lacking and are very much traditional SAN architectures with no auto-tiering functionality (at least that I'm not aware of).

In terms of an upgrade from where you are it greatly depends on your requirements and moving to the next product in line isn't necessarily the right move. While the 3PAR's do look very good you need to analyse your current environment and determine the required tiers of storage.

I.e. do you really need SSD? Are you currently IOPS or throughput constrained? Also your DR/BCP requirements need to be looked at as this might also sway your decision based on array features or integration with third party backup tools. For example, you might consider the 3PAR stuff if you are an existing Veeam customer as they are releasing integration with them shortly (currently integrates well with the Lefthand/Storevirtual gear).

If you are already running an extensive fibre channel infrastructure you might decide to stick with this investment and purchase another FC attached SAN, putting iSCSI or FCOE options at a lesser priority if you don't have budget to buy new switches, etc.

I used to jump straight to capacity first when looking at new storage but have learnt the hard way. Start with performance requirements first and work backwards to availability/redundancy and capacity as the latter ones tend to be easier to address later.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Ben

[St0rageGuy]

We use the 3Par F400's and now the newer 7400s for our entire VM environment. The arrays have been rock solid, with outstanding performance. Any time you can take an array rated for 12k IOPS and run it up to 40k (no joke, because some developer made a teeny tiny code change) without the place coming crashing down you're onto something.

If you are using an EVA today a 3par array will work fine, my one piece of advice is to make sure the configuration is done following 3par best practices, not EVA best practices. I'm hearing a lot of issues from HP sales guys trying to configure the 3par's the same way they would an EVA.

[nicksta]

We are also considering purchasing a 3PAR 7200 and are at the stage of determining the storage requirements. The storage system will support a virtualise infrastructure, could anyone please offer advice on RAID level configurations. Approximately 60% of our environment is development or production guests where disk performance is low priority. I wondering if we could get away with portioning the disks to between RAID10 and RAID50 to provide maximum storage without sacrificing performance where required. Thank you in advance.

[mcowger]

I'd like to humbly suggest you are doing it backwards....

Determine your IO requirements (IO/s, size, latency), give them to your vendor(s) of choice, and have THEM design a solution and RAID levels that meets the requirements....

[Gkeerthy]

I am working with 3PAR for the past 2 years, we have T400, V serires and the latest 7400 with 4 controllers,

The main highlight of 3PAR is

- very simple to manage, lun provision, exposure etc.

- it is TRUE Active/Active array (symmetirc active/active)

- the 7400 has SAS HDD support, so use 300 GB SAS 15K disks, to have more spindle

- Check with the vendor for the maximum throughput support for each controller, then caculate your iops and application IO profile and then size it properly.

- Use SSD disks with AO for auto tiering - it is great feature

- Has good support and integration with VMware, SRM

the issues I have seen, is the bottle neck in hadling the throughput by the controllers. So simply adding more spindles wont give the performance, you need properly analyse the current peak load (MB/s) and check with the vendor, the advantage is you can add more controller at later stage, so if you add 4 controller then it will be good.