Installation guide

Additional external storage requirements

A typical data center will have some sort of shared conventional storage for the various applications based on

performance needs and business storage requirements. Most business solutions will have requirements for multiple

environments besides the primary production storage requirements such as development, test, quality, training,

sandbox and backup. Each of these additional environments typically will require their own storage solution. Many of

these non-production environments do not require the extreme performance of the production solutions and therefore

can be hosted on lower cost, higher capacity storage solutions. The HP P6000/Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) disk array

could make a great backup solution for the VMA units.

There are at least three options to hosting the storage for these other environment requirements:

 Use the same storage architecture as production

 Use existing conventional storage in the current data center such as a storage area network (SAN)

 Add additional disk array storage

This reference architecture includes additional conventional storage recommendations for these multiple non-

production environments. However, you can substitute an existing SAN solution or add additional VMA arrays to satisfy

these non-production requirements.

HP P6300 EVA – The HP P6000 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) is an enterprise class virtual storage array family for

midsized customers at an affordable price. With built in virtualization, the P6000 EVA is designed to improve capacity

utilization and be easy to manage, which lowers the cost of ownership compared to traditional arrays. These arrays have

high performance, scale easily, and are highly reliable and available. The P6000 EVA is a trusted platform for enterprise

application consolidation with solutions for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP. It also is a great

platform for all non-production environments.

The HP P6000 EVA family is the next generation of EVA with two new models: P6300 EVA and P6500 EVA. The P6000

EVA family supports Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives with a wide range of Small Form Factor (SFF) SAS drives, Large

Form Factor (LFF) SAS drives, or combinations of both, to better match customer storage capacity, performance, power,

and availability needs. The P6000 EVA models are available with Fibre Channel host ports only, or Fibre Channel and

1Gb/s iSCSI host ports, or Fibre Channel and 10Gb/s iSCSI/FCoE host ports. P6000 EVA is also very energy efficient, with

high efficiency power supplies for both the controllers and disk drive enclosures, with temperature sensing, self-

adjusting variable speed fans.

HP P6000 Command View management software now includes Thin Provisioning, which helps reduce the storage

capacity required, to help reduce the number of disks needed, and thus reduce power and cooling costs. P6000 EVA also

offers robust local and remote replication capabilities with HP P6000 Business Copy and HP P6000 Continuous Access

software. P6000 Business Copy now also supports Dynamic LUN and RAID migration, where in one step the user can

change the characteristics of an existing LUN, such as size, RAID type, or disk type while the host I/O operation is active.

This feature is useful, for example, to move data to more space efficient storage tiers or to move a heavily accessed LUN

to a different disk group to improve performance.

The reference configurations deploy two disk groups within the EVA. For example, the test/development database

volumes are in one disk group and the archive logs, flashback recovery, and RMAN backup volumes are in the second

disk group. HP 6300 Enterprise Virtual Arrays are configured and managed using the HP Command View EVA Software.

Note:

Always check HP’s Single Point of Connectivity Knowledge (SPOCK) compatibility

and interoperability matrix for a “configuration set” of Storage Area Network

(SAN) components. It is also very important to examine the notes in each section,

because they may further limit or clarify supported configurations.

See hp.com/storage/spock (requires an HP Passport account).

Figure 4 shows a sample drive configuration for the P6300 EVA.