Hp msa70 storageworks 25 bay

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mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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I would buy a DL180 or DL380 and make my own clustered storage. I have Lefthand VSA so I can build hyper-redundant iscsi solutions but check out ESOS and nexenta CE ..
 

Chuntzu

Active Member
Jun 30, 2013
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I have been looking at these for a little while and thinking about picking one up and seeing if I can modify the backplane to accommodate das SAtA/SAS. It would be some work but it would be a lot cheaper than buying a SFF supermicro chassis for a grand just to hold some drives.

Found this review that shows how it goes together. wondering if soldering a direct connection on the backplane or figuring out the pin out for those din connectors might work?

REVIEW - HP StorageWorks MSA70 JBOD 25 x 2.5" Drives - Overclockers Australia Forums
 

Jeggs101

Well-Known Member
Dec 29, 2010
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I've seen lots of these on ebay. Seeing that decomposition makes me think that it isn't worth the trouble trying to rehab the physical unit.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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dirty little secret is many of these have defective backplanes that cause instability. No way to flash the problem away unless you RMA the backplane.

But since we are on the 3rd generation of this now (D2700 is the prior, and MSA70 is 3rd old) - nobody really cares.

But seriously why not just spend a few more bucks and get a whole server? DL180 G6 can do a lot more work than one of these ;)

Just saying. Buggy unpatchable (possibly) dumb JBOD or a complete server? I can only imagine a crappy L5520 pair with 48gb of ram and some nexenta would be pretty dope.


If you want cool, get the MDS600 - 70 drive bays of 3.5" love. they even make one in between these two sizes which fit 1-3 computers plus drives for some lefthand lovin'.
 

s0lid

Active Member
Feb 25, 2013
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Tampere, Finland
Buggy backplane you say?
Well then i won't bother with making the original internals in mine queit, I'll just carve the internals empty from HP gear, then make diy backplane for it and hook normal ATX PSU and SAS2 Expander to it!
 

nev_neo

Active Member
Jul 31, 2013
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I got a whole bunch of 2.5" drives from another project and i'm trying to use it in a SAN. not sure how to proceed.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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buy a DL380, add 8sff, no sas expander. 16SFF - two raid controllers, stupid fast.

My flagship server is that. dual 10gbe emulex cards, dual LSI 9266, samsung 840 pro.

One option to remember is the P420/1GB FBWC works in the dl380 g6/g7 :) which can do ssd read acceleration with hp SAAP 2.0 key. Imagine two of these guys with 512gb ssd read caching 7 2.5" drives in raid-5 . or 1TB SSD caching 6 2.5" in raid-10 :)

Smart shoppers do their homework! Always check backplane revisions!

The question I ask is "Can you upgrade this to the latest (xx.xx) firmware for me before shipping? If so we have a deal".

99.9% "Sorry we cannot we have no computers to do this" (other than the 1000's of servers they are listing). rarely do I get "Sorry, without a backplane RMA this will not take the latest firmware which stabilizes and improves throughput so your junk doesn't hang and flake out".

Oddly the same units that are 3x-10x more expensive, typically say "Yes these are on the latest xx.xx firmware".

Makes you go hmmmmmmmm.
 

nev_neo

Active Member
Jul 31, 2013
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What are you using to serve those drives as a SAN ?
I'm trying to setup an iSCSI based storage - was looking at OI + napp-it on ZFS, but i've read that its not too stable for iSCSI with vmware.
I guess the other option is to share them as NFS, but again not sure if its the best use for the situation.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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Since I like reliable storage, I have lefthand (Storevirtual) VSA. It is a grid based hyper-redundant clustered storage platform that can run on hardware or a vsa appliance. It is not cheap but has reliability that even the VMWARE storage VSA does not.

We had a raid card kick it and take out a node, the remaining nodes with network raid-1 kept running. It even supports SRM and site to site replication and failover. Super high end failover. Say your storage nodes burn down at site 1 but site 2 10km's away is still up ! The local servers can fail over to the other site storage and keep on trucking. Or say the whole site 1 burns down, you can have servers on site 2 and storage and it will keep running.

It also supports wan replication snapshots for longer run/lower bandwidth - every 1 hour snapshot and replicate. All on the storage side - not on the server side :)

ZFS imo is not production quality. VAAI drivers that "hang" are not at all useful. SAN must be super reliable.

Netapp and EMC also sell VSA's so you can use your old hardware and build storage.

Windows 2012 can do this with SOFS and SMB-3 but it is limited in use to hyper-V and sql server stores and quite honestly hyper-v sucks compared to esxi :)

ESOS is a cool option to look into! google it. Openfiler has gone pay only for the good quality target code :(

Remember good storage is not cheap, cheap storage is not good !
 

Chuntzu

Active Member
Jun 30, 2013
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Not certain how these would work (ebay link below), but these look like sas controllers and expanders for the x9270 (large storage array)...or something along those lines. Tried figuring out how they are being used (perhaps dual domain sas with shared cache) but for some reason I want to believe these are sas 6gb/s. If any of you HP pros know I was just curious

012483 001 HP 4 Port SAS I O Module for MSA60 Storage Units Etc | eBay

ps Just bought one of the msa70s, I will let everyone who is interested know how the modding of the backplane for DAS sata 6.0 goes. Only out $95 if it all goes south.