HPE Storage Users Group

Hello all,

does anybody use a HP 3PAR StoreServ File Controller (based on the HP StoreEasy 3830 Gateway with Windows 2012 Storage Server) as a filer-head for a 3PAR-Array, and can share her/his experience? Any recommendations?

Thanks a lot!

Don't use them myself , but would a 3par domain fix this ?

What do you need to know ?
BTW The gateways are a powerful and flexible bit of kit, greatly underestimated in my experience.

So when you wipe the lipstick off the pig, it appears all we're left with is Windows Storage Server 2012 which adds SMB 3.0 network file shares, with de-dupe and file data classification tools...
I left out iSCSI since that is not a value add to the 3PAR kit... what else am I missing? Surely there's more.

Being a windows server, I presume this appliance would be subject to all the regular headaches associated with running Windows? Monthly patching/reboot, 3rd party anti-virus, 3rd party backup software, centralized logging agents, SCOM, etc anything your shop requires a windows server MUST run...

No denying it's Windows but windows availability and file serving (especially in 2012-R2) has come a long long way from the bad old days of 32 bit 2003, take a look at the number of enterprise workloads that now run on Windows. You can even add Cluster Extension to scale across sites with storage aware automated cross site H/A etc. Put the same on a fault tolerant industry standard server that's easily and cost effectively expandable with plenty of horsepower and you can offload file serving overheads to the appliances. Scale Block or File independently, Unlimited CALs included, Clustering, SMB3, NFS3/4.1, Dedupe, Online cluster aware patching, Inline File system repair, Compression, Encryption, SMI-S integration, T10 unmap etc.

The benchmarks I've seen on SMB (@20K concurrent users) and NFS, the file serving nodes are always spindle bound not memory or CPU and Windows NFS outperforms some native implementations from household names. A few other things to consider (that I would think most would actually find advantageous), because it's Windows it'll integrate seamlessly with your AD, group policies and existing tool sets for things like Antivirus, Backup and Monitoring, no need for expensive specialist integration's or proprietary agents like NDMP etc they can just sit on the box. The file controller as an appliance provides a known quantity from a sizing and performance perspective and a convenient way to purchase, commission and support. But if you want you can also go out and build the same yourself either physical or virtual or go with something third party, but I doubt you'll find such a complete stack that just works.

Personally we just stand up Winodws VMs on the 3par and use RDMs.

Richard Siemers wrote:So when you wipe the lipstick off the pig, it appears all we're left with is Windows Storage Server 2012

It's my understanding you've covered the entirety of it.

The product probably exists as a sales collateral against Netapp, who continually complain that it's a "weakness" of the 3PAR that it doesn't do SMB. The solution is, a server, that you can say is a part of the SAN.

It sounds silly but it has won us points in the argument vs Netapp.

Hi all,

thanks for your advice. We haven't decided yet for or against this filer config.

hdtvguy:

Personally we just stand up Winodws VMs on the 3par and use RDMs.

How exactly do RDMs help when you need smb??

cookie:

would a 3par domain fix this ?

No, domains let you split an array into several virtual arrays, but don't give you smb/filer-capabillities. I think.

Richard Siemers:
The abillity to fix vulnerabillities is not a disadvantage, it's an advantage. Linux has a lot of vulnerabilities as well, and I doubt that these are fixed in all other filers on the market as regularly as on a windows box... Sure, "hardened linux"... ssl anyone?

RDMs help us get over the 2TB limit of vsphere prior to 5.5. Also another important gotcha is in 5.5 they now support vmdks larger than 2TB, BUT to increase them you need to power them off. So no more dynamic growing of vmdks if it is larger than 2TB. So we just stick with RDMs and present large disk that way. The other minor advantage of RDMs is it allows us to swing data volumes easily between servers. We had some explosive growth so we split a file server in 2 by standing up a new VM and just swinging the one RDM to the new file server. We had actually tried the HP X9000 ibrix solution, but that was more headaches and they bought it back. Our Windows team manages Windows very well so we find that keeping it simple allows them to effectively manage the servers better than elaborate file serving solutions. Also because they are VMs they are very portable across hosts and we leverage 3par replication and SRM for DR.

It's not that silly, EMC on both VNX & VNX2, HDS with HUS, IBM V7000 & Dell Compellent all use gateways for file. Typically they're a proprietary OS with many fewer features and lower performance than 2012, it's just they just don't like to advertise them as such. Look under the covers though and that's what they are and not that powerful or flexible either, but it ticks the unified storage box Also if you consider these are DL380 Gen 8's and you can add additional CPU, memory, ports etc they have as much if not more horsepower than most mid range arrays.