By the middle of last year, I was up against a data crunch. I have three older model HP EVA 8×00 arrays totally full of fiber channel drives (one rack each, no expansions), and the two oldest were around 95% full of data (yes… the growth got away from me with several major requests for lun space). The third one was my safety valve but was also filling up faster than I liked. Decisions… buy expansion racks or maybe try to migrate in higher capacity drives? Either option was a lot of work, and it was pretty obvious due to the cost in time and effort and ongoing maintenance, not to mention the ill feelings about investing in older technology, that I needed to do some shopping for new hardware.
Working with our HP vendor, we arranged for a new EVA p6550 that got installed a couple months ago. With newer, 2.5″ SAS drives, and only half populated, it would easily hold all the data from those two old EVAs, with room to spare! Using the built-in Continuous Access software, we started a data migration plan that will be complete by next month. The data replication groups were VERY easy to configure, took only a few days to sync up, and run in the background without any issues. It does unfortunately require the reboot of all servers that are connected to the EVAs (HP Alphaservers and Itaniums running OpenVMS… hmmm, that’s worth another post…) to convert from their old array connections to the new p6550 but this has worked out well in coordination with our regularly scheduled maintenance. I am also relieved that I can add in more drives to accommodate for 100% growth all in that single rack system.
Our first “big” SAN array, way back in the day, was an HP EVA5000. It was a bit buggy at the time, but each iteration of the EVA that we implemented has only gotten better and they’ve been a reliable and solid bedrock upon which our company has built our storage infrastructure.