-- Buzz Kaas, director of IT, Pattillo Construction

I participated in a HP vs. EMC “taste test” challenge at the HP facility in Houston this past January where we compared the usability of the EVA4400 and the EMC CX3-10.

Working side by side with a SE for each product, we ran through a typical setup of: creating disk groups, selecting RAID levels, creating LUNS, assigning to hosts, several types of virtual cloning routines and tearing it all back out.

Without a doubt, the EVA4400 was easier to use and each task was accomplished in a fraction of the time compared to the EMC CX3-10.

But, more important than ease-of-use is the unique architecture of the EVA. For example, when making a disk group, the controller can auto select the drives for the group. All RAID types (0, 1, 5) are spanned across all spindles in the group. No more hot spots and maximum IOPS for all RAID types. All LUNS are shared across all drives in the group, so all spare disk capacity is pooled together. This makes for a very efficient use of disc space, because you don’t have to have spare capacity designated for each LUN. Expanding a LUN was as simple as typing in the number of GB you want to expand or contract to.

Finally, why risk your data, when you can work on an offline copy in just two minutes? Making clones requires just a few mouse clicks and I can definitely see how we would use cloning for all of our test environments when it’s this easy.

There were three flavors of cloning for the EVA4400:

1) Vsnap: Instantaneous copy using pointers then deltas are accumulated with each page change.

2) SnapClone: Instantaneous copy, but allocating an identical LUN size. SnapClone starts out like a Vsnap, but then records blocks over time to create an exact copy.

3) Mirror Clone: Dynamic copy for DR, takes time for availability, but clone can be fractured, used then reattached.

While EMC does have a lot of granularity, the EVA was far more user-friendly. It enabled me to be more proficient at network storage operations, which we normally farm out, because of staffing constraints. The HP vs. EMC challenge was a great opportunity to really compare the products head-to-head and showed me the value of an easy to use SAN solution.