HPE ProLiant MSA 2042 Storage Array CTO

The MSA 2042 further drives the MSA 2040 family into the world of flash acceleration with a new set of MSA models which includes 800GB of flash capacity in all SFF and LFF configurations. In addition to including 2x400GB Mixed Use SSDs in the base configuration, the MSA 2042 also includes a rich set of software features as standard including 512 Snapshots, Remote Replication and Performance Tiering capabilities, all at a very attractive price compared to other hybrid configurations. The 800GB of SSD capacity can be used as Read Cache or as a start to building a fully tiered configuration. With the inclusion of the Advanced Data Services SW License, customers can choose how to best utilize these SSDs to provide the optimal flash acceleration for their performance hungry applications. Both Read Cache and Performance Tiering utilize a real-time tiering algorithm which works without user intervention to place the most accessed data on the fastest medium at the right time. The MSA 2042 will dynamically move hot pages up to SSD for flash acceleration and move cooler, more stagnant data back down to spinning media as workloads change in real time hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and week-to-week. All done hands free and without any management overhead from the IT manager.

• MSA 2042 comes standard with two 400GB flash drives which allow IT managers to accelerate application performance
• All MSA 2042 models come standard with the Advanced Data Services (ADS) Software Suite LTU.
• MSA 2042 SAN controller supports 8 GB FC, 16 GB FC, 1GbE iSCSI or 10GbE iSCSI.
• MSA 2042 SAS controller supports 6 GB and 12 GB SAS host connectivity.
• 6 GB transportable read/write cache per controller.
• MSA 2042 SAN Controller allows customers to create their own Combo Controller by mixing FC and iSCSI SFPs.
• The MSA 2042 will support a maximum of 7 disk enclosures (either LFF and/or SFF). Add-on enclosures can either be D2700 SFF drive enclosures or MSA 2040 LFF disk enclosures.

In addition to the usual RAID levels, the MSA 2042 features several important additional levels. RAID 6 offers the highest level of RAID protection. It allocates two sets of parity data across drives and allows simultaneous write operations. It can withstand two simultaneous drive failures without downtime or data loss. RAID 10 is mirroring and striping without parity and allows large Disk Groups to be created with high performance and mirroring for fault tolerance. RAID 50 combines the block striping and parity of RAID 5 with the straight block striping of RAID 0, yielding higher performance than RAID 5 through the addition of RAID 0, particularly during writes.