I think I must have been the first one in Belgium being LeftHand Certified, just before HP acquired LeftHand Networks in 2008. As an instructor I was curious for this new technology of Network RAID and attended a TTT (TrainTheTrainer) session. At the end of the TTT there was an online exam and BAM! I was LeftHand Certified…
Since then I have the virtual appliance based VSA’s running in my datacenter… In the beginning it was just for playing and testing, afterwards I have put some production data running as well on it.
Since StoreVirtual with Network RAID is built for high availability I always tried to keep my volume online in any situations, just to satisfy the geek in me…
Well that seems to be 7 years ago now… 7 years of 100% uptime…
This makes me feel good (geeky?) when I see all those numbers of HPE and other storage vendors stating 3, 4, 5 or now even 6 nines of availability with their storage arrays. I did the same (and even more) with StoreVirtual VSA… Cool huh?
Little test: who knows the story about this picture and what is the link with this article?
Hardware refresh, hypervisor updates, software updates, firmware updates
Now the most important question is: how this is possible?
I started with 2 DL380’s G1 and VMware 3.5. Since my electricity bill was way too high with these servers (+400W each) I replaced them with G6 servers (around 150W each). Now I am running on Gen8 blades around 85W each…
I moved also from VMware 3.5 through 4.0, 4.1, 5.0 and now 5.5… Soon I will move to 6.0 one day (I just need to find some free time)…
Twice a year HPE releases a software update for the StoreVirtual platform. I went from 8.1 all the way up to the latest version 12.5… Somewhere around version 10.5 I was also in the Beta testers group with an additional update in between.
Also I changed from a 2node VSA cluster with FOM (Failover Manager) to a 3node cluster, first without and now with storage tiering (Adaptive Optimization). First with local data disks (in the DL380’s) now with storage volumes on my 3PAR with FC and NL disks…
And yes my storage volume stayed online all the time…
Why? That is simple… Just follow the StoreVirtual basics being “maintain quorum” or keep a majority of managers online… As long I was replacing, upgrading or maintaining 1 server at the time, my data volume would stay online… For 7 years now…
Conclusion: you want data availability in an easy and not so expensive way? Well maybe consider the HPE StoreVirtual VSAtechnology… It rocks…
Let’s go for 8 years!
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