IT Pro Verdict

HP’s new virtualisation features make one of the best SMB storage arrays on the market even better. The MSA 2040 is easy to deploy and the automated data tiering features boost performance and lower storage costs

Reasons to buy

+
Automated data tiering; Converged FC/IP SAN data ports; Top value, High expansion; Excellent performance

Reasons to avoid

-
New web console takes some getting used to; virtual volumes only support manual snapshots

By Dave Mitchell

published 25 June 2015

in Reviews

The new hardware

The 2U chassis is available with 12 LFF or 24 hot-swap SFF hard disks. HP offers a wide choice of drives including enterprise SAS, NL-SAS, SSDs and self-encrypting drives but SATA isn't supported.

The new converged SAN controllers in our review system support both 8/16Gbps Fibre Channel and 10GbE iSCSI. Each controller has four SFP+ ports grouped in two pairs so you just pop the transceivers of your choice in either pair which automatically sets their personality.

HP also offers a 4-port 12Gb/sec SAS controller model and all versions have 4GB of on-board cache memory protected by a super-capacitor and CompactFlash card. Expansion potential hasn't changed from the previous generation but is still very high with support for seven disk enclosures and up to 96 LFF and 199 SFF drives.

The new SMU v3 console provide a clear overview of storage pools, disk groups and tiers

Page 2 Next

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.