HP MSA 2040 Storage (2015) review
HP new Gen4 MSA 2040 delivers enterprise storage virtualisation at an SMB price
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
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Automated data tiering; Converged FC/IP SAN data ports; Top value, High expansion; Excellent performance
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New web console takes some getting used to; virtual volumes only support manual snapshots
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
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