HP MSA P2000 Gen3 Modular Smart Array

How can the flexibility of the HP P2000 G3 MSA Array Systems help remedy large storage needs and small budgets? By offering high-performance 8 Gb FC, Combo FC/iSCSI, 6 Gb SAS, 1 Gb or 10 GbE iSCSI connected arrays designed for efficient storage consolidation at affordable prices.

The FC/iSCSI Combo controller gives the flexibility to share the array resources over two protocols, supporting the needs of dissimilar departments and budgets. All P2000 G3 MSA Arrays ship standard with 64 Snapshots and Volume Copy enabled for increased data protection.

The FC, Combo FC/iSCSI, and iSCSI controllers allow replication with optional Remote Snap software. The arrays allow departments and small to medium businesses to grow capacity as needed up to 149 drives.

Mixing of LFF and SFF enterprise-class SAS and archival-class SATA drives is supported. Configure with a single controller for low initial cost, or dual controllers for high availability for the most demanding entry-level situations.

Features

The HP P2000 G3 MSA Array Systems deliver low cost, consolidated storage array solutions to meet departmental and small to medium businesses requirements with 8Gb Fibre Channel, Combo FC/iSCSI, 6Gb SAS, and 1Gb or 10GbE iSCSI systems accommodating LFF and SFF SAS, SAS MDL, and SATA MDL drives.

The HP MSA P2000 G3 offers single controller models for low initial investment, or dual controllers for higher data protection. The FC/iSCSI Combo controller allows sharing of resources between different departments with the most cost-effective protocol. A wide choice of drive types means a high ROI.

The HP MSA P2000 G3 Array Systems offers a choice of drives: high performance enterprise class dual-ported SAS drives and low cost, high capacity SAS MDL, or archival class SATA MDL drives. The array head comes with either 12 or 24 drive bays able to simultaneously accommodate all three drive types.

The HP MSA P2000 G3 comes standard with 64 snapshot and Volume Copy cloning capability enabled. Snapshots can be optionally boosted to 512 snaps, and the P2000 G3 FC, FC/iSCSI Combo, and both 1GbE and 10GbE iSCSI models support the Remote Snap (replication) software option.

The HP MSA P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array allows customers to grow their storage as demands increase from 600GB to 178TB SAS, 384TB SAS MDL or 192TB SATA . The HP P2000 G3 MSA arrays can support 7 LFF enclosures and 96 drives or 5 SFF enclosures and a maximum of 149 drives. Single or dual controllers accommodate any budget.

Powerful new controllers (FC, FC/iSCSI, SAS, 10GbE and 1Gb iSCSI) and 2GB of read/write cache each provides support for up to 64 hosts. Latest 8Gb Fibre Channel, 6Gb SAS, and 10GbE and 1Gb iSCSI technology means that the users will have fast, reliable, and affordable access to their data.

All HP MSA P2000 G3 models come with 64 Snapshot and Volume Copy capability at no extra charge. Increased snapshot capability of 512 snaps is an option. Remote Snap software is also an option, allowing snap replication over the Fibre Channel, Combo FC/iSCSI, and 1GbE and 10GbE iSCSI controllers.

With 512 LUNs and greater than 40TB LUN size depending on the RAID chosen, the HP MSA P2000 G3 Array has more than sufficient LUN flexibility for a wide variety of configuration choices.

Reduce risk of IT failure with dual active/active controllers, dual-ported drives, and redundant hardware components.

For increased data protection the HP MSA P2000 G3 comes standard with 64 Snapshot (optional 512) and Volume Copy software, giving space-efficient, copy-on-write snapshots and clones. Optional Remote Snap (replication) is available with the Fibre Channel, Combo FC/iSCSI, and both iSCSI models.

Reduced time to operation with easy and secure deployment. Reduced risk from operator errors, resulting in less downtime and data loss, while increasing customer satisfaction.

Supports customer replaceable hot-plug components such as drives, disk enclosures, controllers, fans and power supplies.

HP P2000 G3 controllers support upgrading prior generations of MSA2000 G1 and G2 models regardless of protocol. The P2000 G3 FC, FC/iSCSI Combo, SAS, or iSCSI controllers support data-in-place upgrades, protecting the user's investment in JBODs and drives and giving greater performance, functionality.

HP MSA P2000 Gen3 Modular Smart Array

• 8Gb Fibre Channel controller
• Two host ports per FC controller shipped with SFPs. The P2000 G3 FC controller can run in either point-to-point or FCAL (loop). The default is FCAL which is used in Direct Connect, particularly with two controllers. The PtP (fabric) mode is used with almost all switches.

• This ingenious dual-protocol "combo" controller supports a full FC SAN through the 8Gb FC ports, while designating the two 1 GbE iSCSI ports to enable remote replication over iSCSI protocol and perform as an iSCSI target. This allows economical sharing of the storage resource (the P2000 G3 array) with one department needing the performance afforded by the 8 Gb FC ports while simultaneously supporting another department with lesser performance needs and a budget only allowing a 1GbE iSCSI network.
• 6Gb SAS controller
• Four 4x host ports per 6Gb SAS controller.
• 10GbE iSCSI controller
• Two 10GbE ports per G3 10GbE iSCSI controller. Ports are ready for the choice of SFP (none included)
• Supports the ProCurve and ISS versions of the following 10GbE parts for use in the controllers:
  HP 10Gb Cables
  HP SFP+ 10GbE Copper Cable
  HP ProCurve 10-GbE SFP+-SFP+ Direct Attach Cable
  HP SFP+ Transceivers
  HP BladeSystem 10Gb SR SFP+ and HP BladeSystem 10Gb LRM SFP+
  HP ProCurve 10-GbE SFP+ SR Transceiver and HP ProCurve 10-GbE SFP+ LRM Transceiver
  No SFP+ LR Transceiver support
• 1 Gb iSCSI controller
• Four 1 Gb Ethernet iSCSI ports per G3 iSCSI controller

• 2U rack height. 12 Large Form Factor or 24 Small Form Factor drive bays, accommodating SAS and SATA. Comes with space for one or two controllers, or P2000 3.5-inch disk Enclosure I/O modules (LFF chassis only)

• The P2000 G3 controllers support both the P2000 3.5-inch Large Form Factor (LFF) drives, and the HP Storage 2.5-inch Small Form Factor (SFF) drives.
• Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) enterprise-class drives are designed for high demand, 24x7 usage.
• SAS Midline and SATA Midline are usually reserved for archival of data as they are both relatively inexpensive and are available in very large capacities.
• The HP entry-level family of arrays can accommodate both SAS and SATA drives within the same enclosure making it ideal to have both business-critical, high activity files on SAS drives while using Snapshot, clone, or Remote Snap capability to keep back-up or archival data on the less expensive drives.
• For investment protection, the controllers will support single and dual port SAS & SATA drives in a legacy single - or dual - domain MSA70. This support allows current owners of MSA70s to migrate their single port drives (in their MSA70 only, not into the array head) to be attached to a P2000 G3 FC or SAS. They can only cascade to another single I/O MSA70. This is not a data-in-place transition, and overall performance could be impacted.
• SAS drive performance can be approximately 30% greater than SATA performance on sequential host I/O. SAS performance excels in sequential lower latency response time and random I/O per second transaction performance due to higher rpm disk speeds yielding lower seek times. SAS drive random performance is generally twice that of SATA drives.
  NOTE: P2000 and MSA2 3.5-inch Large Form Factor (LFF) drives are for use only in the P2000 G3 or MSA2000 models. The 2.5-inch Small Form Factor (SFF) drives are supported only with the P2000 G3 or the MSA2300 G2 controllers and are Storage hot-plug 2.5-inch drives. Optional Disk enclosures Just as the user has a choice of chassis for the array head (LFF and SFF drive bays, AC or DC powered), so also do they have a choice of expansion disk enclosures accommodating either drive size. Both the P2000 and the D2700 disk enclosures can be hot-added to an operating array. (NOTE: these are not supported as part of a NEBS-certified configuration with the MSA Carrier Grade Chassis. There is a certified JBOD listed in the Carrier-grade section)
• P2000 3.5-inch drive enclosure. This 2U storage enclosure (AJ941A) is designed to support twenty five Storage 2.5-inch Universal form factor (SFF) 6Gb SAS or SATA hard drives. It ships standard with dual I/O modules installed.
• This 3.5-inch drive enclosure can be attached to either the P2000 G3 FC or SAS LFF or SFF array head.
• Each configured model ships standard with two .5m mini-SAS to mini-SAS cables for cascading to other P2000 drive enclosures
• Up to seven P2000 3.5-inch enclosures can be attached to a P2000 G3 FC, FC/iSCSI Combo, or SAS controller in the array head.
• D2700 2.5-inch drive enclosure. This 2U storage enclosure (AJ941A) is designed to support twenty five ProLiant 2.5-inch Universal form factor (SFF) 6Gb SAS or SATA hard drives. It ships standard with dual I/O modules installed.
• This 2.5-inch drive enclosure can be attached to a P2000 G3 controller (SFF or LFF) array head
• The D2700 enclosure ships with a two .5m miniSAS to miniSAS cable.
• Up to five D2700 may be attached to the P2000 G3 array head, given total support for 149 SFF drives.

• The P2000 G3 FC, Combo FC/iSCSI, SAS, 1 Gb or 10GbE iSCSI controllers are designed to allow an installation to begin with smaller capacity and be able to grow gradually as needed. The flexibility of SAS or SATA drive technology, form factors, sizes, speeds, and costs per GB allows a system to easily fit in almost any budget.
• Large Form Factor configurations can scale up to 7.2 TB SAS, 36TB SAS MDL or 24 TB SATA, expandable to 57.6 TB SAS, 384 TB SAS MDL or 192 TB SATA with the addition of a maximum of seven P2000 3.5-inch Drive Enclosures.
• Small Form Factor configurations can scale from 21.6 TB SAS, 24 TB SAS MDL or 12 TB SATA MDL. With the addition of five D2700 JBODs, the P2000 G3 can support 134 TB SAS, 149 TB SAS MDL or 74.5 TB SATA MDL.
• Users may configure a 24-drive P2000 G3 SFF array head with 12-drive LFF P2000 3.5-inch disk enclosures. This is an excellent method for a configuration that supports fast SFF enterprise-class SAS drives in the array head, combined with economical LFF drives staged for archival purposes, all in the same array.
• Qualification of larger capacity drives is ongoing.

• Vdisks can span across multiple enclosures, where drives used in the Vdisk can be contained in different enclosures. The maximum number of drives that can be used in RAID 1 Vdisk is 2; RAID 0, 3, 5, 6, and 10 is 16; and for RAID 50 Vdisk is 32.

• The HP 2000 family of arrays supports 512 LUNs (total volumes in a dual controller system) and LUN sizes up to 64 TB depending on the RAID configuration chosen. The array supports expansion and deletion of any LUN.

• In addition to the usual RAID levels, the P2000 G3 features several important additional levels. RAID 6 is the highest level of RAID protection. It allocates two sets of parity data across drives and allows simultaneous write operations. It can withstand two simultaneous drive failures without downtime or data loss. RAID 10 is mirroring and striping without parity. It is the most popular of the multiple RAID levels, allowing large arrays with high performance in most cases and superior fault tolerance. RAID 50 combines the block striping and parity of RAID 5 with the straight block striping of RAID 0, yielding higher performance than RAID 5 through the addition of RAID 0, particularly during writes.

• Performance numbers are a guideline as established by tests using RAW I/O in an Operating System Agnostic test lab environment. 144 GB 15K SAS drives were used in a dual controller configuration of 12 vdisks consisting of twelve disks per vdisk, 1.6 TB volumes, and 3 volumes per host. 4 hosts directly attached to the P2000 G3 array were used in this test configuration (results cannot be expected with a single host). Results were achieved in Sequential Writes with 256K blocks; all random tests were based on 8K block sizes.