P10400(v400) vs 7x00 array?

[mujzeptu]

I am curious what pros and cons others have found when comparing the P10400 vs the 7x00 array?

We currently have a P10400 and are looking at adding another array in the near future. I am curious if it is worth considering a 7x00 instead of another V400? We may add a tier of SSDs, but it would primarily be for hard drives. We prefer FC as we have an existing 8Gb SAN, and use it almost entirely for VMFS datastores.

When comparing the two what pros/cons have you found? What helped you make the ultimate decision?

[Cleanur]

Both management and features are identical. the difference really is about scale and modularity.

Both the 10400 & 7400 support up to 4 x A/A Symmetric controllers
Port count, cache size and ASIC count are significantly higher on the 10400
The 10400 will scale to 960 disks, the 7400 will scale to 480 disks
10000 is upgraded in magazines of 4 drives, the 7400 min upgrade is 2 drives
The 10000 has 4U enclosures with 40 drives, the 7400 has 2u and 4u enclosures with 24 drives 2.5" & 3.5"
Licensing caps are based on ~1/3 array capacity so 7400 hits the cap sooner than 10400
10400 has FC backend allowing for greater distances between cabinets, 7400 is SAS backend but will never need to scale beyond 2 racks.
There are some differences in disk type availability but overall they're both about even in this respect.

[Richard Siemers]

The 7400s are worth a hard look. They are a backbone grade workhorses and can be half the cost of a V. The big difference is the max # of spindles and the max # of FC ports.

One "idea" we are entertaining is "purpose built storage", where we use 7400 sized arrays tailored to the application farm they will be hosting.... tailored meaning licensed features. Our ESX farm for example doesn't need/use snapshots, replication, and can do it's own thin provisioning if we let it... so one possible solution we're looking at this year is a plain 7400, no frills.... 100% thick provisioned to ESX, and then let the ESX admins manage it from their world.

[mujzeptu]

Interesting, thank you for the feedback!

Does anyone know if Peer Persistence, Remote Copy and/or Peer Motion work between a 10400 and a 7400 or 7450?

[Cleanur]

Yes all work between 7k and 10k series, just make sure you have enough FE ports.

[hdtvguy]

The V400 controllers have more cache as well. And I tend to align with Richard. The V400 is much more an Enterprise broad based array and we are looking at the 7400 as a purpose built tier for specific applications. We will continue to use the V400 as the main array, but are leaning toward making a 7400 a high performance app tier where we would just put 10K and SSD in it. We are also looking to leverage the 7400 to work around the numerous remote copy issues and thus will also only put app on the 7400 that need high frequency replication so that they do not have to compete for the limited concurrent slots the 3par has for replication.