HPE MSA

We utilize the HPE MSA as the SAN of our VMWare ESXI infrastructure in both our main office in NY and our disaster recovery site in New Jersey. We utilize the fiber channel configuration of the MSA, both connected thru a fiber channel switch and also directly connect to the MSA. The business problem it addresses is a full redundant SAN solution for our infrastructure. Ensuring business-critical applications remain operational if there are any hardware issues with the MSA. This is achieved with the dual controller configuration as well as having multiple host bus adapters. Giving us redundancy for controller failures and HBA failures.

The HPE MSA is best suited for basic SAN requirements. Having dual controllers provides redundancy and allows for firmware upgrades without incurring downtime to the environment. It provides enough IOPS for most workloads be it VMWare or servers requiring storage. For applications such as MS SQL or Exchange, other SAN solutions would be better. Plus the lack of storage snapshot capabilities is also a detriment to the product line. Lack of any reporting capability is also an issue especially when determining workload capabilities.

We are using the MSA for disaster recovery. It holds all of our replication VMs and gives us the ability, with the help of VM software, to roll over to the replication cluster in order to bring our systems back up in the event of a disaster at our primary data center.

The MSA is perfect for Disaster Recovery, but I wouldn't advise using it for production. Production is best left to flash storage and not spinning disk. I think the MSA would be appropriate for a test or sandbox network for testing and training as well. The storage is cheap and it is functional.

HP Storageworks MSA provides our company with affordable, flexible and reliable storage for our medium size systems. HP support and quality are good, and this decision has proven to be a good one for our users. Availability, scalability, and affordability are higher and reliability has been excellent.

SME environments, those after quality and reliability. Price point is medium. Reliability better than the competition in our opinion.

Ideally suited for smaller IT teams, needs little technical skill once setup and running.

Start small and expand later, lands of options for increased storage space and configurations.