Big 3Par News - New Model, NAS capability, new management +

[3ParDude_1]

Guys just wanted to share the 3Par news from HPDiscover as soon as I had it, in summary:

• New 3Par Model announced 7440 - a hybrid with the power of flash

• New 3Par management console announced, looks slick.

• 3Par now supports file and object storage natively!

• Greater integration between 3Par and StoreOnce

Check out this blog post for full details:
http://wp.me/p4wKu7-8S

[RitonLaBevue]

Give a look to AntemetA spot and say them "hello from XAT" ^^

[Schmoog]

I'm very excited to see HP follow through on the promises that their technicians have made to me.

Particularly the file storage. I am very interested to see how it functions with replication.

I'm also interested to see the details of the upgrade path from the 7200/7400 to the 7200c/7400c

[Leif]

As far as I have seen all upgrades from "non C-models" to "C-models" is off line. There is an upgrade guide, HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 to 7000c Storage Upgrade Guide with a lot of information.

[3ParDude_1]

Schmoog I asked the same question earlier the answer I got was - To convert a 7200/7400 you would need to replace the controllers with the new converged models, this can be done without down time

EDIT - I have spoken to another HP engineer more expert in the controller node upgrade and they have advised it is an offline process not online.

[Schmoog]

If it's online, then that's pretty great!

Depends on the cost too heh.

[Schmoog]

On the file side of things, one of the challenges we face is how to manage failover between datacenters.

As it stands today, our choices are DFS-R (Bad, even with the improvements in windows server 2012 and 2012R2), or VMware SRM (better, but consumes an SRM license, and can extend downtime).

I have had several conversations with HP about NAS storage, and am hoping they have addressed this particular challenge in file persona: being able to A) replicate the file storage and B) failover the storage between systems while maintaining user access. Kind of like peer persistence, but with file persona.

[RitonLaBevue]

Ever try MSCS 2012 with Peer Persistence ?

[Schmoog]

It's a good thought.

Problem is I don't have a Peer persistence setup. I don't have enough ports, and I don't have a merged FC fabric.

IP however is a different story.

[Leif]

Schmoog I asked the same question earlier the answer I got was - To convert a 7200/7400 you would need to replace the controllers with the new converged models, this can be done without down time

It would be great if this upgrade could be done online. But when I read the conversion guide I can find this information:
"The StoreServ itself will remain physically active during the procedure but it cannot serve host i/o or perform other data-related functions during the upgrade. This activity requires maintenance downtime. Schedule approximately 30 minutes per node."

In the checklist it gets even clearer:
"Verify that all host IO is stopped by Customer using statport -host command"
"Verify that the Customer has shutdown the hosts /unmounted the volumes connected to the
StoreServ"