I just picked up one of these for my VM cluster. I was tempted to buy them all, but I decided instead to share my "find" with the group.
HP StorageWorks MSA2312SA Dual Controller Modular Smart Array AJ805A | eBay
What you get for $499 plus shipping is an HP MSA2000 G2 12-slot shared-SAS array (model MSA2312sa) with dual active-active controllers. The HP MSA is a bit different than other arrays - in good ways and bad but mostly good.
On the plus side:
1) A VERY well made piece of hardware.
2) Shared-SAS array with eight SFF-8088 host connectors. You can directly connect the array to eight hosts, or to four hosts with full HA across controllers.
3) Supports clustering!
4) The controllers are active-active with mirrored caches. Those caches are backed with supercapacitors (no batteries to wear out) and they have flash memory for backup storage should the power stay out for a significant amount of time.
5) The array is web managed
6) You can buy very expensive upgrade keys to get up to 512 snapshots. VERY expensive - around $450 for 8 snapshots or $2,000 for 512 snapshots.
7) It's a current model - though just barely. Parts are freely available from HP. They sold some 50K of these, so parts will be around for years.
8) Price new is around $7K without drives. eBay price for HP refurbished with warranty is around $4K, so $499 is a steal even without a warranty save for the 90 day DOA one from the seller.
9) Works with SAS and SATA drives from 72GB to 3TB - though see below for the big gotcha.
10) Includes two SAS ports through which you can connect an expansion chassis - including a cheap-as-chips HP MSA70 with 25 2.5" caddies.
11) Redundant and hot swap drives, controllers, fans.
On the downside:
1) The drive sleds are VERY proprietary. The backplane has strangely offset connectors that will not work with non-HP drive sleds. The HP drive sleds themselves are "active" in that they include a SAS-to fiber channel interposer board or a SATA to fiber channel interposer. This means that no third-party sleds will ever work.
2) HP drives specific to the MSA array range from very expensive (dual-ported SAS drives) down to almost reasonable (dual-ported 1TB 7200 RPM SATA drives for $120 used or $190 new).
3) Configuring the array for the first time requires an odd RS-232 to nano-RS-232 null modem cable that costs $280 from HP but is equivalent to a $70 version sold on eBay.
4) The G3 version of the array has been released, so the G2 will be discontinued soon and EOL in a few years.
5) Drives run as 3 Gbit/s - fine for normal drives but slow if you dream of swapping in SSD drives.
6) Rails are not included - but are only $40 on eBay if you look around.
RAID6 performance is pretty good - 1,050GB/Second reads and 730MB/Second writes maximum. By the way, the 6G SAS G3 version is faster, but not dramatically - 10% higher IOPS, 50% higher write throughput, 57% higher read throughput. It is also much more expensive of course.
Probably the best low-cost disks for this unit are the 1TB 7200 RPM drives. They are SATA, but because of the interposer cards they work as dual-port drives, visible to both controllers as dual-ported drives. eBay price is around $170 each new and around $125 used, though I did manage to pick up six new ones for $60 each just recently.
Finally, the chassis that I received is in "as new" condition - no signs of wear whatsoever. The badging says that it's part of an HP X9320 - which is a big HP scale-out NAS sytem with two server heads and five or more iSCSI disk arrays. It looks like someone took one of the arrays from a recently off-lease x9320 and replaced the HP iSCSI controllers with a pair of HP SAS controllers. This is quite OK with me, but the seller did fail to mention it in the auction.
HP StorageWorks MSA2312SA Dual Controller Modular Smart Array AJ805A | eBay
What you get for $499 plus shipping is an HP MSA2000 G2 12-slot shared-SAS array (model MSA2312sa) with dual active-active controllers. The HP MSA is a bit different than other arrays - in good ways and bad but mostly good.
On the plus side:
1) A VERY well made piece of hardware.
2) Shared-SAS array with eight SFF-8088 host connectors. You can directly connect the array to eight hosts, or to four hosts with full HA across controllers.
3) Supports clustering!
4) The controllers are active-active with mirrored caches. Those caches are backed with supercapacitors (no batteries to wear out) and they have flash memory for backup storage should the power stay out for a significant amount of time.
5) The array is web managed
6) You can buy very expensive upgrade keys to get up to 512 snapshots. VERY expensive - around $450 for 8 snapshots or $2,000 for 512 snapshots.
7) It's a current model - though just barely. Parts are freely available from HP. They sold some 50K of these, so parts will be around for years.
8) Price new is around $7K without drives. eBay price for HP refurbished with warranty is around $4K, so $499 is a steal even without a warranty save for the 90 day DOA one from the seller.
9) Works with SAS and SATA drives from 72GB to 3TB - though see below for the big gotcha.
10) Includes two SAS ports through which you can connect an expansion chassis - including a cheap-as-chips HP MSA70 with 25 2.5" caddies.
11) Redundant and hot swap drives, controllers, fans.
On the downside:
1) The drive sleds are VERY proprietary. The backplane has strangely offset connectors that will not work with non-HP drive sleds. The HP drive sleds themselves are "active" in that they include a SAS-to fiber channel interposer board or a SATA to fiber channel interposer. This means that no third-party sleds will ever work.
2) HP drives specific to the MSA array range from very expensive (dual-ported SAS drives) down to almost reasonable (dual-ported 1TB 7200 RPM SATA drives for $120 used or $190 new).
3) Configuring the array for the first time requires an odd RS-232 to nano-RS-232 null modem cable that costs $280 from HP but is equivalent to a $70 version sold on eBay.
4) The G3 version of the array has been released, so the G2 will be discontinued soon and EOL in a few years.
5) Drives run as 3 Gbit/s - fine for normal drives but slow if you dream of swapping in SSD drives.
6) Rails are not included - but are only $40 on eBay if you look around.
RAID6 performance is pretty good - 1,050GB/Second reads and 730MB/Second writes maximum. By the way, the 6G SAS G3 version is faster, but not dramatically - 10% higher IOPS, 50% higher write throughput, 57% higher read throughput. It is also much more expensive of course.
Probably the best low-cost disks for this unit are the 1TB 7200 RPM drives. They are SATA, but because of the interposer cards they work as dual-port drives, visible to both controllers as dual-ported drives. eBay price is around $170 each new and around $125 used, though I did manage to pick up six new ones for $60 each just recently.
Finally, the chassis that I received is in "as new" condition - no signs of wear whatsoever. The badging says that it's part of an HP X9320 - which is a big HP scale-out NAS sytem with two server heads and five or more iSCSI disk arrays. It looks like someone took one of the arrays from a recently off-lease x9320 and replaced the HP iSCSI controllers with a pair of HP SAS controllers. This is quite OK with me, but the seller did fail to mention it in the auction.
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