C7000

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

How to connect to the Brocade SAN Switch Interconnect in the HP C7000 BladeSystem

So you’ve just bought your new HP C7000 BladeSystem and you have some Brocade SAN switches plugged into the interconnect bays in the back. You’ve already racked the BladeSystem and now you’re ready to configure things.

You go to the back to find a console port to connect to but notice that there’s nothing there. Now how the heck do you connect to the switches? Through the Onboard Administrator of course! HP’s Onboard Administrator (OA) manages everything to do with your BladeSystem. By connecting to the OA you can connect to the SAN switch to manage it.

Here’s how you do it:

First, open up a command prompt window and then telnet to the IP address of the OA. Login with your username and password and that should take you to the command line of the OA. Then type in “connect interconnect 3″ (if the bay number your SAN switch in is 3, put in whatever bay number you have your interconnect plugged into). At this point it will connect you through to the SAN switch.

Then you can login to the SAN switch with the default username and password and then use the command IPADDRSET to set the ip address for the switch to respond to. Then you can connect to the switch via the web interface on that IP to further continue your configuration.

-RP