3PAR 7200 - Adding less than 8 drives

[Schmoog]

With 7xx0 drives must be added by pair.
If you got 3 SFF cages you must add 6 drives minimum.
With 7000 class ha cage is no longer the classic ha.

For what it's worth, even on the 7000 I think that most people would agree that ha cage is still the classic and definitely the best practice

[RitonLaBevue]

I agree that it's the best practice

I now work for a storage supplier for 3 years (www.antemeta.com), 3PAR historical supplier for France.
It's not easy to get new customers buy 7xx0 with ha cage.
7xx0 is "cheaper" than Fx00 this explain why they don't want to give much money to get more cages. And that's for SFF. I never saw ha cage on LFF so far ^^

Since 2008 we have sold and installed about 200 3PAR arrays (E/S to 10000) and we never lost any cage. *cross fingers*

[Schmoog]

I think with the expansion in the maximum number of shelves for the 7200 with 3.1.3 we will see more ha cage for lff. When you can only add 5 additional shelves, it's hard to do ha cage on lff when the better drives are sff

[Cleanur]

I think the mistake many people make is that they push HA Cage as the default vs the competitions HA Mag equivalent without highlighting it's superiority and by doing so (good intentions aside) you likely put yourself at a price disadvantage.

If you are considering HA Cage then you need to ensure the Customer/Users/Stakeholders understand the additional value this is providing upfront. But just as importantly they also need to understand the minimum upgrades required to preserve this level of availability. In my experience it's always easier to up sell a feature than it is to try and remove that feature later in order to meet a price point.

HA Cage is what we should strive for, but it's not always possible to do this up front and remain competitive (e.g some buy on $ per GB) but it is pretty easy to do later on down the line with 3PAR's data mobility tools.