HPE Storage Users Group

Hi all, quite new 3Par user here. Our current setup is a 7200 that is half full (24) with I guess what are the standard drives, the 10k ones. As we transition over to these, I'm under the realization after talking to people who helped us on install that we may have need for nearline drives (sorry, I'm not all the way up on the terminology yet). But for instance, our marketing department and security department have archival content that takes up space but probably does not need to be access real frequently. I just came across this community and thought this may be a good place to ask if indeed what we need is to potentially fill up the other half of the cage with a nearline drive for this type of file. I appreciate any suggestions you can give.

NL offers a better $/GB ratio so it's appropriate for true archival use as well as for letting stale data on file servers tune down to cheaper storage. However the 2.5" NL disks aren't really that much bigger or cheaper than the 10k disks, to take maximum advantage of the cost benefits you'd want the 3.5" disk shelf, ask your var to run the numbers both ways if you have a relatively small amount of archival data but if you fall into the 10's of TB range it will be cheaper to go the 3.5" route. Note that if you want the 3Par to do the automatic shuffling of data you'll need an AO license for each disk in the array, if you want to manage where data is placed that does not need a license but comes at the cost of your time and with the risk that you'll put too much work on the NL drives and achieve poor performance.

Nearline drives are a good target for archival data. If you only have the 2u 2.5" enclosures on the 7200 then the 1000GB NL drives are all you can install today, the larger 2, 3 & 4TB drives require the 4u 3.5" enclosures but your archival capacity needs will dictate the most efficient type to use.

Typically you would want to run the NL drives in a raid 6 configuration which means you need a minimum of 12 disks of any of the above type as a starting point (2 controllers x (4data + 2parity) = 12 disks). After that you can expand in pairs.

Thanks. I know we do not have AO licensed (because obviously we didn't need it with our current setup).

Our needs are not really big at this point, I'm just worried about eating up the space with have with archival type stuff. We have the basic initial setup, which I think is 8TB or close. I am in the process of moving files and services to the VM's that use the 3par. When I hit our marketing dept's files, their files are somewhere over 600GB, which in the grand scheme of things is not much at all, however, in the scheme of my 8TB, it is pretty hefty. I think a decent chunk of that is from previous years where they may need to refer back to it from time to time, but probably wouldn't actively be editing that old stuff. So I guess my thought was if we can categorize stuff by previous years, have it on a share that is NL storage and do the same with archival security footage as needed.

If you're using Windows you could look to use File Classification Infrastructure (FCI - see below link) for this. Even if you don't add NL disks you could create separate CPG for your FC disks with a wider (more capacity efficient) stripe size to hold the legacy data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2RvDL2De14