Increased storage for Hp Proliant servers

[bluegnu]

Hi,

We have a server room with a mixture of HP Proliant G3, G4 & G5's in use. I would like to increase the available HDD space on these and wondered what the best solution might be.

I can't simply replace the drives with larger ones as all the drives have data on so I have been thinking that there must be an external solution.

Is the HP StorageWorks something that can be used for this? If I had 6 TB's on the HP StorageWorks, could I divide this up between my other servers and add the space as new available drives?

If this is possible a) is it the best solution and b) would there be any degradation in performance?

thanks

 

[cajuntank]

I'd look at a iSCSI solution from HP, that way you could carve out whatever disk space needed on the storage box and all you need is a available network interface on you respective server for that iSCSI connection. HP's lower end storage runs on Windows Storage Server R2 Ed. While their mid to higher end stuff runs on some Linux variant.

 

[bluegnu]

Thanks for the response. Is this the sort of thing I should be looking at?

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/226997?utm_source=google&utm_medium=products

 

[bluegnu]

Sorry, on a cheaper front this as well?

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/237846

 

[cajuntank]

Exactly. You just need a free NIC interface on your server (if you don't have one, you'll have to buy another NIC...I'd get a dual or quad port NIC) and a switch or enough free switch ports on your existing. Best practice is to have a switch or dedicate a VLAN to your iSCSI subnet so you can enable something called Jumbo Frames (frames over your standard 1500 size...usually around 9000). You will enable Jumbo Frames on your VLAN/switch and on the NIC interfaces dedicated for those iSCSI connections. You enable Jumbo Frames on your HP NICs via the "HP Network Configuration Utility".
Hope that helps.