HP MSA2040 SAN works with third-party drives - huge cost savings

[dba]

The older HP MSA disk arrays (e.g. MSA2000 and P2000 series) worked just great with third-party (non-HP firmware) disk drives, something you can't say about EMC and other "Enterprise" arrays. I previously filled an MSA2000 with some 3.5" Hitachi drives that I had laying around. This time, I needed a newer/faster unit, and wondered if the new HP MSA2040 was as forgiving.

Well it is. My empty HP MSA2040 SAN chassis arrived recently, and I just screwed some 800GB Toshiba PX02SMF080 SAS SSD drives into some generic HP drive sleds (the ones we use in the 24-bay Dell c6100) and loaded them into the MSA2040. It works great! Of course the drives in this array need to be 2.5" dual-port SAS to work, so I won't be slotting in any consumer-grade SATA drives.

I don't know that I'd try this trick with a non-SSD drive if I planned to create a highly utilized SAN. You can make the argument that "special" (or at least "validated") firmware is necessary for reliability when you have 24 or more spinning drives working at full throttle. But with fast SSD drives that barely break a sweat in a normal SAN, I'm not worried. I do plan to "soak test" the rig before putting it into production, but I don't anticipate any problems.

 

[Patrick]

Great news! Main site writeup/ post material?

 

[Patrick]

Which Hitachi drives? I thought you were going with the Toshiba ones?

 

[dba]

Which Hitachi drives? I thought you were going with the Toshiba ones?

You are correct - text changed. The drives are Toshiba PX02SMF080, though I think that any dual-port SAS drive would work of course.

 

[dba]

Great news! Main site writeup/ post material?

I definitely owe you a short main site post. Maybe early next week?

 

[dba]

Some more HP MSA information:

There are several different versions of the MSA disk arrays - maybe even more than I know about. Generally I see MSA2000 G1, G2, and G3 series systems, the P2000 systems that I believe is the G3 or maybe came after the G3, and now the MSA1040 and MSA2040 series. The G1 is too slow to consider, in my opinion, but even the G2 system are not too bad for bulk storage. The MSA2040 is a sleeper - a $7,500 (base cost) array with 90K IOPS and 4GB/s over 16Gb FC or 10Gb iSCSI.

The 12-bay 3.5" drive versions of these arrays use SAS or SATA drives slotted into MSA-specific "interposer" drive sleds that turn them into dual-ported drives. Buy the sleds on eBay (wait until they go for <$80 each) and add your own 4GB SATA NAS drives to get surprisingly cheap high availability storage. You can also use the interposer sleds plus commodity 2.5" to 3.5" drive adapters (see STH articles) to add SATA SSD drives to your MSA array, though the older MSA systems didn't have the IOPS to make good use of SSD drives. The 2.5" drive versions of the MSA arrays use normal HP drive sleds (always under $10 each and sometimes far cheaper than that) and require dual-ported SAS drives - no SATA allowed.

There are some HP experts on this forum who would probably add more info.

 

[TuxDude]

At least on the P2000 G3 (I have five of them at work, two 10GbE iSCSI and three 8G FC) I can confirm that dual-ported SAS drives are NOT required for the 2.5" versions. I've only done it using HP branded single-port 10K SAS drives - I had quite a few extra laying around all of identical capacity pulled from servers that used single-port SAS for internal drives before dual-port became common (DL385 G2 era) and an extra D2700 2.5" SAS expansion shelf that is certified to work with the P2000's. It does pop up quite a few warnings about the inability for the controllers to failover with single-port drives, and you cannot mix single-port and dual-port drives in the same array, but it did let me make an array out of them. If non-HP dual-port drives work in that array, then I suspect non-HP single-port drives will also work with the same restrictions I just mentioned.

If I can find a few 2.5" SATA drives next week I will put them into sleds and pop them into the array and add a reply here with the results.

 

[dba]

At least on the P2000 G3 (I have five of them at work, two 10GbE iSCSI and three 8G FC) I can confirm that dual-ported SAS drives are NOT required for the 2.5" versions. I've only done it using HP branded single-port 10K SAS drives - I had quite a few extra laying around all of identical capacity pulled from servers that used single-port SAS for internal drives before dual-port became common (DL385 G2 era) and an extra D2700 2.5" SAS expansion shelf that is certified to work with the P2000's. It does pop up quite a few warnings about the inability for the controllers to failover with single-port drives, and you cannot mix single-port and dual-port drives in the same array, but it did let me make an array out of them. If non-HP dual-port drives work in that array, then I suspect non-HP single-port drives will also work with the same restrictions I just mentioned.

If I can find a few 2.5" SATA drives next week I will put them into sleds and pop them into the array and add a reply here with the results.

So single-port 2.5" SAS drives are OK, but they would only be attached to a single controller so no high availability. HA is, for me anyway, the only reason to go with a SAN box like this over say a ZFS server, but good to know that at least they work in a pinch. Fingers crossed that your test with SATA drives also work - would be good to know.

BTW, you can add one or more expansion chassis to an HP MSA array, and the expansion chassis can be 3.5" attached to a 2.5" disk base unit or visa-versa. In other words, you can mix drive sizes.

 

[TuxDude]

Yes - I've got a variety of expansion chassis across my P2000G3 arrays of both models. It's interesting to note at least for the P2000G3 (maybe not anymore for the MSA2040) that while both the 2.5" and 3.5" controller shelves are 'P2000' model shelves, for expansion shelves only the 3.5" is a 'P2000' which takes the sleds with interposers - the 2.5" expansion shelf is HP's standard 2.5" SAS JBOD, the D2700. I don't have the parts to test it, but I suspect that the D2600 (3.5" version of the D2700) would also work with the array controllers though without needing or supporting the interposers (though with SATA drives would give the single-port limitations from my previous post). I'm curious as to whether any SAS-expander JBOD could be plugged in and work just fine.

 

[dba]

Yes - I've got a variety of expansion chassis across my P2000G3 arrays of both models. It's interesting to note at least for the P2000G3 (maybe not anymore for the MSA2040) that while both the 2.5" and 3.5" controller shelves are 'P2000' model shelves, for expansion shelves only the 3.5" is a 'P2000' which takes the sleds with interposers - the 2.5" expansion shelf is HP's standard 2.5" SAS JBOD, the D2700. I don't have the parts to test it, but I suspect that the D2600 (3.5" version of the D2700) would also work with the array controllers though without needing or supporting the interposers (though with SATA drives would give the single-port limitations from my previous post). I'm curious as to whether any SAS-expander JBOD could be plugged in and work just fine.

With the MSA2040 it's still true that only the 3.5" drives use interposer cards. In fact, the D2700 expansion chassis ($400 on eBay) are supported by the MSA2040 controllers, but since they have only half the bandwidth of the MSA2040 expansion chassis, they are not recommended for use with SSD drives. For bulk storage, however, seems like a great deal.
It is interesting that the MSA2040 docs do not talk about the D2600, which is supposed to be dual-domain 6G SAS. I wonder how it and the MSA2040 expansion enclosure differ?

 

[MiniKnight]

Are these the old Lefthand storage systems?

 

[TuxDude]

With the MSA2040 it's still true that only the 3.5" drives use interposer cards. In fact, the D2700 expansion chassis ($400 on eBay) are supported by the MSA2040 controllers, but since they have only half the bandwidth of the MSA2040 expansion chassis, they are not recommended for use with SSD drives. For bulk storage, however, seems like a great deal.
It is interesting that the MSA2040 docs do not talk about the D2600, which is supposed to be dual-domain 6G SAS. I wonder how it and the MSA2040 expansion enclosure differ?

Assuming that the MSA2040 expansion shelf is the same as the P2000 expansion shelf except upgraded to SAS3, then the main difference is that the backplane is set slightly farther back in the chassis in order to make room for the interposer card sitting between it and a 3.5" drive. That is why I suspect that if only using dual-port SAS drives that do not require the interposer then the D2600 would also work.

 

[TuxDude]

Are these the old Lefthand storage systems?

Nope. These are the bottom rung of HP's storage line. Back from the orignal MSA1000 and upgraded many times over the years, very basic dual-controller arrays that can expand up to a few extra JBOD chassis.

LeftHand is a much newer and more powerful architecture, which was renamed to P4000 (MSA was P2000 while HP was naming all of their storage arrays PX000 for a while) and is now named StoreVirtual.

 

[mrkrad]

Have you seen the new thin provision, scsi unmap, sort-dedupe technology for msa? It's brand new! hot stuff!

 

[dba]

Nope. These are the bottom rung of HP's storage line. Back from the orignal MSA1000 and upgraded many times over the years, very basic dual-controller arrays that can expand up to a few extra JBOD chassis.

LeftHand is a much newer and more powerful architecture, which was renamed to P4000 (MSA was P2000 while HP was naming all of their storage arrays PX000 for a while) and is now named StoreVirtual.

MSA is a pretty "old school" SAN compared to a scale-out storage system, but with the MSA2040, the term "bottom rung" doesn't quite work. For scenarios where a straight up SAN makes sense, the MSA2040 is pretty good stuff - 4GB/s throughput, far better than "entry level" IOPS, iSCSI and FC on the same hardware, SSD support, tiering (with extra cost license), and, as mrkrad points out, some really interesting features added quite recently - I'm upgrading the firmware on mine as we speak.

When they become available used on eBay at reasonable prices, could be interesting for some STH users.

 

[TuxDude]

I'm not trying to say they are bad arrays - I love my P2000 G3's (though not great memories of the two MSA1500's we had back in the day) and they have great performance and reasonable prices. But HP does position them as entry-level arrays, followed by StoreVirtual (Lefthand) in the mid-range, and 3Par as the high-end solution.

I was not aware that unmap/thin/dedupe functionality had been brought down to the MSA line, but it makes it an even better value - I wish I could get it on my slightly older controllers.

 

[dba]

Just found the docs on the new features: HP MSA Storage Updates Focus on Virtualization, Thin Provisioning, and Tiering for SMB | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

All good except the $4K price on SSD tiering.

 

[mrkrad]

MSA 2040 customers can take advantage of all new features except Performance Tiering via a free firmware upgrade. Performance tiering is just SSD READ-only caching aka HP SMARTCACHE aka LSI CACHECADE 1.0 .

remember these are just linux boxens that do some hardware assist raid (but software raid-6 iirc).

 

[TuxDude]

remember these are just linux boxens that do some hardware assist raid (but software raid-6 iirc).

I'm not too sure about that. I've often had to reboot the management side of my P2000 controllers (they have memory leaks in all but the most recent few firmwares) which takes out all management functionality when I do it - no SSH, HTTPS, etc. but does not affect IO from hosts at all. And looking at the CLI reference for the MSA2040 the 'restart' command is identical. You can restart one or both management controllers, or one or both storage controllers.

 

[dba]

MSA 2040 customers can take advantage of all new features except Performance Tiering via a free firmware upgrade. Performance tiering is just SSD READ-only caching aka HP SMARTCACHE aka LSI CACHECADE 1.0 .

remember these are just linux boxens that do some hardware assist raid (but software raid-6 iirc).

One thing that I could not do without an add-on license: Create a thin-provisioned pool using SSD drives. It does let me build a normal "linear" vdisk.