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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Linear disks and snapshots

Previously, the MSA 2040 uses vdisks (virtual disks) to provision storage. Now called linear disks, you can still create them but they won't have data tiering applied as they are independent of the new storage pools.

At any time you can swap over to the older SMU v2 web console to manage linear disks and host mappings. The standard license includes 64 snapshots upgradeable to 512, but these can be only be scheduled for linear disks.

Snapshots of virtual volumes must be taken manually but they offer significant advantages. Unlike linear disk snapshots, they don't need a dedicated storage pool, are created much faster and allow you to create child snapshots.

The web console graphs shows our test data being moved to the SSD performance tier

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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