HPFOCUS

======Posted by Ehab======
We are offering to one of our customers one enclosure with 12x BL460 Gen8 servers and added one D2200sb (12x800GB SSD) and we want to have this D2200 working as a shared iSCSI storage, so as far as I know I need to add x1800 Blade Gateway in order to achieve this, so I just need your confirmation

- Is that correct? I just need to add x1800?
- Do you I need to add any other H/w or S/w
- Doing so I will be able to present this storage to all the servers inside the enclosure, so what about the servers outside the enclosure will I be able to do that as well? or I need additional component
- If the customer decided to replicate this in another site, will we be able to replicate the data using this model?
- If yes will it be via a host replication (like HP Storage mirroring which does not exist so it will be via Double-take directly) or there is another way

On the side
- Can we use flexfabric modules at the back of the enclosure and have the Gen8 servers with Flex-10 adaptors and use it as NICs only no HBA? Will we be able to slice it to 4 NICs and use only network uplinks from the Flexfabric

I am very sorry for the number of questions but I really appreciate your prompt feedback and valuable advice.

======Posted by Prabhakar======

I would suggest the HP StoreVirtual VSA software which gives you iSCSI capability. Instead of an X1800 you can probably add a blade server with either VMware or Hyper-V that’s connected to the D2200 and convert it to a shared storage. Some of the added benefits include
- Ability to plan for HA since you can cluster multiple VSA’s and create HA using Network RAID capability.
- Add more capacity by adding more VSA instances, if required.
- Replicate to a remote location.

Try out http://www.hp.com/go/vsa for additional details.

You get shared storage capability to servers both within the enclosure and outside, replication capability, HA etc.