HP MSA 2040 Storage (2015) review

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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