Anyone running the VSA? What kind of IOPS are you seeing and are you running hybrid or all spindles? Hell, even if anyone has an experience with any StoreVirtual products would be cool.

Tag, because I've been wanting to learn more about those.

Called my HP rep, I now have an NFR license. I'll see what numbers I can come up with.

So, some basic numbers I threw together tonight.

4x Seagate Constellations 3TB 7200RPM drives configured in RAID 10 with a 512Kb stripe.

Server is a basic Xeon with 32GB of RAM, I tried to maximize caching as much as possible in the RAM.  Simulated 70/30 read/write I got right around 1200 IOPS, which isn't bad on 7200RPM spindles.  I don't have many hybrids laying around, but I might be able to add some SSDs for caching or scratch next week.

So that is on a single server with no network RAID?

Correct, I just grabbed one of my test boxes and threw it on there. Sorry couldn't do more testing but I only have so much equipment laying around

More than I have sitting around haha. With those IOPS I'm assuming your controller has a decent sized cache on it.

It's a pass through HBA, I'm using the server ram as cache.

Does it allow you to choose how much RAM to use as cache?

I basically told to enable write back and read cache and it figured it out. It also lists some options about using SSDs for scratch and tiering. Overall it seems a solid and mature product.

The LeftHand stuff has been around for a while. They just basically took the OS and made it a virtual appliance. Those StoreVirtual boxes are just regular HP servers with LeftHand OS running that you cluster. I assumed it would be pretty good, just haven't really gotten around to using it since licensing can still get pretty expensive to the point that an MSA 2040 in a small environment is cheaper. You don't get the same level of fault tolerance but for a lot of SMB customers they can save the money and take the small risk of downtime while their 4 hour response warranty takes care of hardware failure. I've seen an extraordinary low failure rate on top tier storage appliances outside of redundant components.