HP MSA 2040 Storage (2015) review

HP new Gen4 MSA 2040 delivers enterprise storage virtualisation at an SMB price

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

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Automatic everything

The latest GL200 firmware introduces HP's new SMU v3 web console which you'll need to use if you want virtual volumes, data tiering and caching. We've been used to the older SMU v2 web interface and found it took us a while to get the hang of it.

Its quick start wizard made light work of initial deployment where it helped us configure general system settings, management access and data port assignments. The system supports two storage pools assigned to each controller and within these we created virtual disk groups.

The rest is automated as SAS drives are placed in the standard tier, NL-SAS arrays get put in the archive tier and, if licensed, SSDs go into the performance tier. We could also create SSD read caches which are automatically assigned to the storage pools.

Disk groups are automatically placed in the storage tier best suited to the selected drives

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

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.

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