HP Lefthand P4500 / Proliant DL185 ?s

[cyclone3d]

Been doing some research trying to figure out if these are worth using.

What they were sold as is Lefthand P4500 SAN units.

After doing some research I found out that they are just DL185 with Lefthand SAN/iQ installed on them.

I have 2 of them, each with 12x 250GB SATA drives.

I know from experience that swapping out a drive with a different sized one while running, the system will simply not even detect the drive. Not sure if this is because all drives must be the same size or if it only supports certain specific drives when running the SAN/iQ software.

It looks like they support up to 1TB drives per bay. If they support 2TB, that would be even better. I will have to look up the specs on the RAID card to see what I can find out.

The question I had was if I would see any noticeable performance increase when using them as a SAN if I added a second CPU or added more RAM.

The processor should be a Quad core Opteron at 2 - 2.3Ghz from what I could find out about the stock setup.

They also only have 2GB of RAM installed each. I am guessing this is why it used to take so long to delete snapshots when I had them in a production environment.

Anybody have any experience with upgrading these when running the SAN/iQ software?

 

[cyclone3d]

So I did a bit more searching and from what I can find, if I replace the P400 RAID card with a P410 RAID card, I can use drives up to 6TB in size.

Not sure what the max size the lefthand software will recognize though.

 

[Kelvarr]

We have P4300's with two different flavors of drives. One has 750GB drives, the other has 1TB. I can't really help you out though, as anytime we have had to replace drives, they are always replaced with the same density.

 

[cyclone3d]

Ok, getting somewhere.

1. The "enterprise" SATA 250GB drives are actually 250.1GB, and the consumer drives are 250.0GB. so when you try to replace a drive with a regular 250GB, it thinks that the drive is too small...

2. If you want to use a larger drive, you must boot with a monitor and keyboard hooked up and tell the RAID card to rebuild. If you just do a hot swap, the Lefthand OS can't even see the drive.
If you boot without a monitor and kb hooked up, it will just auto bypass the rebuild since you didn't offer any input and it won't work.

So now it is rebuilding with a 500GB in place of the failed 250GB.

Edit: The second unit had a bad drive as well. I swapped it out with a 500GB drive and it picked it up without rebooting. Very strange.

Anybody have access to the newest P4500 (DL185) BIOS? Lame HP has locked down BIOS upgrades to users with active warranty contracts. I have the second newest, and from the release notes I probably don't need the latest but it can't hurt.