HPE Storage Users Group

So we know SSD caching is coming soon, and inline dedupe has been hinted at, but today our local HP storage tech told me that NAS is going to be available on controller (vs the Windows based gateways) towards the end of this year. Apparantly they've been losing a bunch of deals due to the gateways and have had a bunch of try and buys returned because the storage guys don't like admining things through the gateways (good for us as we did our recent 7400-2 to 7400-4 upgrade through a RENEW bid on such a returned system). I personally don't need this feature as I prefer to use a VM as a NAS head but I know others here might be interested.

People want unified controllers until they add 10tb of cifs and try and work out how to back it up.

On a netapp you need ndmp, which either requires an FC tape library plugged into the controller or using Ethernet ndmp backup.

Straight away that limits your backup product, it rules out veeam for a start.

Backing up cifs is a pain, it's slow and if you use ndmp on a netapp. It has to be restored back to a netapp.

So like I said, it's always a great idea until to come to planning the backup or restore.

I'm not sure hp would implement this into the same box though.

I have not hear that yet, but honestly I would not want their NAS on the controller. I personally believe the controllers are being burdened with more and more bloat. With all the new features coming I want the controller focused on serving IO and not running a SMB/NFS process on them. AO, flash cache, all the replications changes coming and to me the controllers are getting loaded up. Our V400 CPUs run 40-60% now during prime time and my Control memory is at 70%, do I really want to keep piling on top of these controllers?

I am already disappointed that they just increased the RAM in the V400s and are not offering upgrades to existing customer with the older lower RAM size.

We solved our NAS issue by just standing up Windows 2008 R2 VMs with RDMs and have large CIFS servers handling 10's of TB and 10's of millions of files and it works far better than HP X9320 did or even NetApp's internal CIFS. True it is still Windows, but we have been OK with it.

I doubt that something big like adding NAS-functionality is a software-only thing. The 7xxx get two years old this year - maybe we see new models? With extra 10G LAN-ports for NAS? Dedicatd CPUs for this?

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When all else fails, read the instructions.

I predict an expensive upgrade order part-code becoming available for 7200's in the future - which does nothing but enable the other 2 cores on the processor which are currently disabled - e.g. the intel E5-2428L's are hex-core (+ hex HT cores, http://ark.intel.com/products/67025/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2428L-(15M-1_8-GHz-7_2-GTs-Intel-QPI)) but only 8 cores are visible/usable to the InFormOS (I presume that is 4 cores + 4 HT cores rather than 2 x quad-core). I guess its to not take "performance driven" sales off the 7400-2 which has them all enabled.


It will be interesting to see which/if any of these coming/predicted/hinted features get bundled into any existing licences/suites and new keys might get issued (or auto-generated as part of the upgrade to the supporting OS version).

There used to be an expensive upgrade for ICL Mainframes which did nothing but change a resistor on the backplane. Engineers were told to make a fuss of doing the upgrade (take a lot of kit in and ask for lots of downtime) but not to do it with people watching. And suddenly the box would go 50% faster.

The best and easiest way to backup CIFS/NFS on a Netapp is not at all... just use snapshots and snapmirror to replicate the cifs volume (with its snaps) to an offsite Netapp. It does not get any easier than that. NDMP is the alternative to doing it the "right" way imho.

I sincerely hope this rumor is true, and we will get on array NAS in the future, as long as it integrates virtual and remote copies with the Microsoft "previous versions" API... anything less would be sub-par, and we expect 3PAR.

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Richard Siemers
The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Richard, that's fine if you have 2 sites and 2 netapp arrays.......

I also heard this rumour today about the native nas from the controllers, and I was lead to believe that it would be served out of a virtual machine running on the system, interesting.

That rings a bell, I had also heard something about the nodes running "KVM" as in Linux Kernel based Virtual Machines... which should open the doors to all sorts of on-node features down the road.

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Richard Siemers
The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.