The HPE MSA – Hiding in plain sight?

I have been in London recently installing an HPE MSA array for a client – whilst they have an incredibly well sorted main infrastructure solution from HPE, with enterprise-class flash storage giving them incredible resilience, performance and AI driven management and planning, they needed something for a specific workload.

It needed to be highly performant, connect into their existing iSCSI setup, be easy to manage, feature rich and fit within a budget.

There are a myriad of options, including public cloud storage solutions, but they either didn’t fit the workload, or the client felt that they were over investing in cutting edge solutions when they needed what the MSA delivered.

I cant remember when I first worked with an MSA array (or a P2000 as they used to be called) so I did a quick google – as far as I can make out, the predecessor to the MSA, the P2000 was released some time in 2010.  HPE continues to innovate, improve and invest in the solution, with the most current array the 6th Generation. The Gen6 features things such as a new RAID protection scheme, up to 45% performance improvement over the Gen5 array, and services such as automated tiering of data to further optimise IOPS, and Async replication now supporting failover and failback.

The MSA has a huge install base, and testament to their reliability and performance, seem to sit there in the background, doing their thing very well, often hiding in plain sight (in a rack!) much like something I spotted at Paddington Station on my return journey….

Whilst walking along to the platform, carried along by the flow of people heading towards the same train as me, something caught my eye, a statue that I have walked by numerous times before, but never really thought about what it might be, why its there or its importance. Nope, its got nothing to do with marmalade sandwich’s, and its been there for an awfully long time too! How many readers know the statue that I am talking about, and why its there? (Drop me a note if you think you do! )

Back to the MSA…..they often fly under the radar when organisations are looking for a storage solution. It might not always grab the spotlight, but it’s a powerful contender!

Perhaps you have an MSA array in service? Does it hide in plain sight?

Dataplanet offer a health check service for the MSA arrays, its free and offers valuable best-practice and overall health insights in an easy to read traffic light manner – get in touch if you would like us to run this check for you!