HP MSA 2052 12LFF SAN Storage 12x 12TB + 20x 600GB SAS HDD

$ 29,011.00

Product Features

Server Type: HPE MSA 2052 SAN Dual Controller LFF Storage
Drives: 12x 12TB + 20x 600GB SAS HDD
Transceiver: 4x 10Gb SFP+ iSCSI Transceiver
Disk Slots: Total of 36 Disks can be Installed
HBA: Standard Network Connection
Power: Dual Power Supply
Management:Web GUI and Console

Sku: SFYS0

Product Type: HPE

Vendor: HPE

MPN: SFYS0

Description
Specifications
Reviews
What We Do
What is NASBIT?
When Will My Order Ship?

We were impressed with HPE’s MSA 2040 storage array when we reviewed it a couple of years ago as it delivered an impressive range of storage virtualization features at a price SMBs found very tempting. The latest MSA 2050/2052 arrays take value a stage further as their uprated hardware controllers deliver a doubling in performance and yet the price remains the same.

A key feature is their real-time data tiering which most competing storage vendors charge a king’s ransom for. Using performance, standard and archive tiers comprising SSDs, SAS drives and Midline SAS drives, the appliances monitor data usage and move 4MB pages between the tiers every 5-10 seconds.

Expansion potential is equally impressive as the controllers each have 6Gbps SAS ports allowing extra disk shelved to be daisy-chained from them in fault tolerant links. You can mix and match LFF and SFF disk shelves with the appliances supporting a maximum of 96 LFF or 192 SFF disks.

Simplified hardware choices

The controllers on the SAN models each offer four SFP+ ports in two groups. These are the converged variety so you can install 8/16Gbps Fibre Channel or 1/10GbE Ethernet transceivers in each group to set their personality.

Bear in mind that the transceivers are proprietary so you can’t use your own and the port group personalities must match across both controllers. HPE also offers 2050/2052 SAS models which come with eight SAS3 host ports for direct attached storage.

Overall, the hardware is the same across all models and the main differences between the 2050 and 2052 are in software. The 2050 comes with the standard and archive tiers enabled and requires a license for the performance tier whereas the 2052 has all relevant licenses included in the price with the Q1J03A model including two 800GB mixed-use SSDs for starters.

Other standard features across all models are support for SSD read caches, thin provisioning, snapshots and volume copies. The 2050 is licensed for 64 snapshots whereas the 2052 can manage the maximum of 512.

Easy install

For our review, we were supplied with an MSA 2052 SFF SAN model equipped with four 800GB SSDs, eight 1.8TB SAS drives and twelve 2TB Midline SAS drives. Our system also came with all data ports fitted with 10GbE SFP+ transceivers.

Installation is a cinch as the appliance’s smart web console runs a setup wizard and then you can get down to provisioning virtual storage. This is easy as the appliance manages two storage pools with one assigned to each controller.

All you do is create disk groups and select controller A or B. For each disk group, you choose the drive type, pick from RAID0, 1, 5 or 6 arrays and leave the appliance to do the rest.

If you choose SSDs, it automatically places them in the performance tier while SAS drives go in the standard tier and Midline SAS drives get dropped into the archive tier. It’s also possible to use SSDs to create a read cache and assign it to a disk group that isn’t part of the tiering process.

Great IP SAN performance

The appliances use two storage pools with each managed by one controller

We tested our MSA 2052 using a pair of Windows Server 2016 hosts with each connected to two ports on dedicated controllers. The MSAs use an asymmetric active/active mode so if you connect one port to each controller you don’t get a performance boost as the link to the controller that doesn’t own the pool shows as non-optimised and is reserved for failover.

With load balanced MPIO links in place and dedicated volumes mapped to each server, we watched Iometer record some excellent cumulative speeds. Sequential reads and writes totalled 28Gbits/sec and 20.5Gbits/sec while 100 percent random operations returned 26.1Gbits/sec and 13.5Gbits/sec.

The web console provides a handy performance chart where you can view graphs of throughput for individual disks, groups, pools, tiers, host ports, controllers and volumes. During testing, we watched the performance tiers and could see data gradually being migrated to them.

Volume copies and snapshots

Snapshots can be scheduled regularly and recovery is a very swift process

Snapshots can be fired off manually or you can use the integral scheduler to run them automatically. It’s very versatile as snapshots can be run as often as every minute, up to 16 per volume can be retained and you can control their frequency with time windows and stop/start dates.

We found snapshot recovery just as easy to use as you simply select a volume and view its snapshots in the list below. Pick the one you want and after disconnecting any hosts, choose the Rollback option to restore your data from that point in time.

You can keep an eye on virtualized storage and hardware performance from the web interface

The Copy Volume feature allows you to copy a selected volume or a snapshot and present it as a new virtual volume. It takes seconds to run as we selected a volume, chose this option and simply decided which controller to assign it to.

Conclusion

HPE’s Gen5 MSA 2050 and 2052 appliances deliver enterprise storage virtualization at SMB prices. The updated hardware boosts performance significantly, they come with a versatile range of features and HPE’s real-time data tiering sets them apart from the competition.

SFYS0

Type	Installed Parts
Server Type	HPE MSA 2052 SAN Dual Controller LFF Storage
Drives	12x 12TB + 20x 600GB SAS HDD
Transceiver	4x 10Gb SFP+ iSCSI Transceiver
Rail kit	Included
Expansion Drive Enclosures	(1+2) 1x Main Dual Controller chassis + 2x HPE MSA 3.5" (LFF) 24LFF Dual I/O disk Enclosure
Disk Slots	Total of 60 Disks can be Installed - Can be expanded to 192SFF or 96LFF drives or any combination up to 7x expansion enclosures
Total Storage Installed	156 TB
HBA	Standard Network Connection
Power	Dual Power Supply
Management	Web GUI and Console

The Case for buying an Integrated NAS System from SimplyNAS

Buying a NAS doesn't have to be complicated or stressful. This may only occur at times when looking to buy a diskless NAS as the risk element of receiving a faulty NAS or drives are accentuated. Nothing wrong in buying a diskless NAS and adding your own drives, the savings made may offset the inconvenience of receiving faulty NAS/Drives and having to go deal with returns, or does it? The argument against buying a diskless and self-populating with drives is quite compelling.

Disk Drives:

We ensure all drives are compatible with the relevant manufacturer, model provide conformity with the relevant compatibility guidelines.
All our disk drives are sourced from manufacturer recommended distributors – we don't buy aftermarket drives or purchase on open grey markets.
All our disk drives are sourced from manufacturer recommended distributors – we don't buy aftermarket drives or purchase on open grey markets.
Our comprehensive batch rotation ensures customer avoid batch issues and thus promote reliability and longevity.
Our methodology for configuration, setting RAID and in-depth burn testing process for disk drives and NAS servers is unsurpassed and the small premium paid for this service is worth its weight in gold.

NAS Servers:

We are authorized partners for all the NAS servers we stock.
We only sell and support NAS solutions, as a specialist our knowledge is unsurpassable.
Our expertise within the technical arena for NAS servers, provides the glue for preventing our customers from making an incorrect buying decision, as we share our knowledge.
Our extensive and professional burn-testing service ensure the optimization and deployment of both NAS and Disk Drives is done to provide peace of mind and total integration.
Ready to use out of the box, no if's or buts.

Thinking of buying a NAS?

QNAP, Synology, QSAN and TerraMaster – Over fourteen Comprehensive years relationship culminating in our expertise of understanding all the NAS products, and skillfully combining performance, reliability and features to ensure our NAS experts are always at hand to help our customers optimize their storage needs.

At SimplyNAS we balance performance, reliability and compatibility to ensure customers get optimized NAS based disk solutions that perfectly match their Storage needs. All our pre-configured NAS systems are evenly balanced in the areas that really matter.
Call our NAS experts today at 407-960-4690

What is NASBIT?

NASBIT© is a Licensed trademark of SimplyNAS. The acronym stands for Network Attached Storage Burn in Testing. This term is used to describe the process of testing new Network Attached Storage (NAS) hardware and firmware for faults before putting it to use in a live environment. This is done by running 'Stress testing' software for a stipulated period of time often 24 to 48 hours, but longer if needed.

When we receive an order for a NAS system pre-installed with disk drives it's prepared and configured with RAID followed by burn testing to ensure the entire system undergoes a thorough examination thus ensuring the server passes all tests to the highest standards set by us. Should the system hardware or any associated components fail at any point of the testing cycle the system is pulled and returned back as faulty our relevant vendor partner, the process seems simple but setting it up is far from easy.

Hard Disk Drives

All Hard disk drives are pre-tested prior to integration; the smallest of faults be it tolerable within industry standards are classified by us as faults, the hard drive is rejected and eliminated from the process and again returned back to source as a D.O.A. (dead on arrival). We continue to select drives from different batches, so as to eliminate any bad batches that may have been produced during manufacturing.

One integrated the drives are put through a vigorous routine that includes stress testing, including temperature tests and a host of read, writes to ensure the drive platters are stressed to the nth degree.

Memory

First, when the new server is turned on, we boot off of the network, and proceed to run the memory test that takes its sweet time, almost 10-12 hours dependent on manufacturer and model.

RAID

The appropriate RAID level is set and the system awaits completion of RAID synchronization. Once completed the NAS server undergoes numerous re-boots and a deletion of original RAID and a final re-build of RAID level again.

If within the designated time span the NAS servers are still running and with zero faults, it is considered suitable for rolling out to our customers. If there is a failure of any kind the systems is replaced with a new one, including hard drives and the process starts again, until the NAS servers passes with ZERO faults.

You would normally expect that this level of testing would be completed by the hardware manufacturers and so these tests shouldn't show up any faults. In our experience of testing hundreds of machines we do find faults, and we do send systems back.

The reason it is so important to perform this level of testing on NAS servers is that the uptime demands are so high. The slightest faults will cause outages and downtime. Once a NAS server is deployed, never again will you have the opportunity to take it offline and perform such detailed testing. Even if it were to crash, there is always a demand that it be put back online as quickly as possible, not left offline whilst thorough diagnostics are completed.

Always remember this is hardware and failures can and will occur even after burn testing has been carried, that is a fact of life we cannot avoid, but we do try and eliminate some of the hassle factor with testing. Thank you for buying from us, we truly appreciate your custom.

NOT AVAILABLE ON DISKLESS UNITS - ONLY FOR SYSTEMS PRECONFIGURED WITH HARD DISK DRIVES

We try our best to get orders shipped as quickly as possible. However, due to the current situation with the Coronavirus, some manufacturers are experiencing stock constraints, shipping delays due to warehouse closures, delays in customs or other unforseen circumstances which can sometimes delay an order as stock levels can change hourly. We understand that your order may be urgent, so if you want to check if something is in stock before you place your order, please call us at 407-960-4690 during our normal business hours of 9-6PM EST. We also try to be transparent on the site with availability and shipping times. We do sometimes make mistakes and greatly appreciate your understanding if this occurs. Please allow some grace and patience as we work through the difficulties and challenges of communicating with our suppliers to keep up with supply changes.

So when can I expect a shipping notification for my order?

Diskless orders that are in stock will ship same day if placed before 2pm.
Diskless units that are not in stock we will ship directly from our suppliers warehouses. This could delay shipping by 1 - 3 business days.
Configured systems are considered special order. This means that they are not already pre-built and ready to ship when you place an order. When you purchase a configured system from us it will not ship out for at least 2 - 3 business days due to the time it takes to pick, assemble, test, RAID and prepare your order for shipment. If we do not have one of the components on the build, that will further delay shipment as we have to wait for stock to come to us. You will receive updates for the order as it goes into testing.

When will my card be charged for an order?

We do not immediately charge your credit card when you submit an order, instead a temporary hold is placed on your card for the amount of the purchase. If everything is in stock, we will charge your card and process you order for building or shipment. Should there be a delay of some sort, we will notify you by email with the ETA and ask for approval to charge your card and process your order. Please be advised that we cannot allocate stock to you without prepayment. So, if you approve the ETA, we will immediately charge your card so that we can secure the stock from our suppliers. Once this charge occurs, any cancellation will incur a 3% fee.

Security and Payment Verification Requests

We take customer security very seriously as fraud and chargebacks are costly. In order to protect you and keep our costs to a minimum, we may ask you to verify your identity when you place an order. If your billing and shipping differ, or if the billing and shipping parties differ and we can't veryify you as a legitimate business, we will send a request by email with a link, asking you to upload documentation for us. We understand that this may make some people nervous, but you are sending your files to the same secured server as your payment and no one can access the files except for the staff who verify them. Your files are purged from the server within 120 days of payment date. As we cannot physically verify your identity when you place an order, this is the only way for us to accomplish this so we ask that you complete the verification as we won't be able to process your order until this step is completed.