C3000

Direct Connect SAS storage for HP Blades

Hello again folks, in the SMB world, especially during these economic times, we can’t always spend all the money we want on storage. Generally customers are limited to looking at some pretty low end storage options.

I have always been a proponent of usings Blades in the SMB along with virtualization to reduce costs for the SMB. But what do you do for storage? Well the most common thing people look at is iSCSI vs FC. Usually people end up going the iSCSI route due to it’s lower cost factor.

Well another thing you can look at is direct attached storage. HP offers something called Direct Connect SAS storage for their HP BladeSystem. This can give you up to 420 TB of zoned or up to 192 TB of shared storage. This can be an attractive alternative for the SMB.

The way it works is by use of controllers installed in the blade severs along with blade switch interconnects and then finally either an MSA2000sa for shared storage or an MDS600 for direct attached storage. You can read more about the solution from HP here.

-RP

Racking HP BladeSystems

One of the things I’ve seen a lot of is improper racking of HP BladeSystems. Sometimes people don’t take the time to RTFM and end up putting the whole thing together wrong in the rack. You’d think this wouldn’t be possible but it’s not that hard to do.

Two major things stand out wrong when racking an HP BladeSystem.

1. People try and rack the HP BladeSystem while it’s fully populated with blades and interconnects and weighs well over a few hundred pounds. This is the quickest way to destroying your blade chassis by dropping it on the floor.
2. After the blade is racked, people just put interconnects into any bay they want in the back without paying any regard to how the bays map to the mezzanine slots on the blades themselves.

What are the answers to these issues? Simple. For #1, you should completely dissassemble the BladeSystem down to every last piece. There are picture based instructions that come with the BladeSystem which make this very easy to do. Once it’s completely in pieces, then you can rack the empty cage fairly easily with the help of one other person. Then once it’s secured in the rack you can start to put it back together again. This is a lot easier than carrying it fully populated and your back will thank you for this.

For #2, go to HP’s website and follow the instructions regarding the mezannine mappings for the C7000 or C3000 (depending on what you’re using) BladeSystem. Then you can end up putting the interconnects in the right bays and your BladeSystem won’t give you a bunch of errors on boot up!

-Cheers, RP