The SmallBizWindows Storage Product of the Year 2015: HP MSA 1040 SAN

March 1, 2015 John Obeto

The HP MSA 1040 SAN is the SmallBizWindows Storage Product of the Year 2015.

HP’s MSA-series entry-level SANs are favorites here, and the MSA 2040 entry level SAN has won our coveted SmallBizWindows Absolute Best Award in 2013.

It has gotten better, with new software, and the line has expanded with the new MSA 1040 SAN, which runs away with this year’s top award for storage.

What impresses about the entry level MSA 1040 SAN are

Thin provisioning.
Wide-striping & rebalancing. This allows all volumes to utilize all storage resources in order to produce more performance. It also facilitates instantaneous volume expansion and rebalancing in the background to “level” the capacity utilization and boost performance.
Auto sub-LUN tiering: This is an automated, real-time tiering feature featuring two modes: performance, and archive. Both modes are automatic, and do not require user attention or input beyond mode settings.
Virtualized Re-direct-on-write snapshotting. According to HP, this feature “dramatically simplifies snapshot management by eliminating snap pool management. All snapshots have similar performance enabling more complex snap-of-snap and nesting capabilities.” Please see my clarification below.
12Gb hard drives.

It also natively supports Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Most importantly, MSA 1040 fully supports data-in-place upgrades to MSA 2040, future-proofing your investment.

All this, in a package that starts at under $6,500 MSRP for a SAN with the following specs:

2 Ports/Controller, and each controller with 4GB cache each. Controllers are factory-configured with SFPs, and each controller supports the following interfaces: 1GbE, 8GbFC, 10GbE iSCSI
A maximum of 3 Disk expansion enclosures using enterprise SAS, SAS Midline drives.
Standard local replication, and optional remote replication
64 standard snapshots with 512 optional
29.4k/19.7k Random R/W (IOPS)

When you look at the advancements listed here, you can see why the HP MSA-series of SANs are without a doubt, both bestsellers, and definitely game-changers, in the entry level SAN space.

CORRECTIONS: March 3, 2015

The MSA 1040 can be upgraded to a MSA 2040-class SAN via a data-in-place upgrade.
The MSA 1040 does NOT support SSDs at all. That feature benefit is reserved for the 2040.
The MSA 1040’s virtualization features are available with the purchase of the available Advanced Virtualization Upgrade

We hope to bring you a detailed review of this product in the June 2015 timeframe.

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