Thank you for the advice. I did meet with HP/presales and we worked through the configurators and came up with a layout. This is all good and I will be going with it. For reference I ended up with 144 SAS 600GB, 24 2TB NL and 16 480GB SSD with estimated usable capacity of ~90TB, realistic IOPS of ~40,000 at ~5ms latency.
So now I have some more wooly questions that betray my ignorance (I've got a few of those on this forum
) . I have to write a requirements document from which will be derived some tests to see if performance requirements are met. Based on the EVAPerf results, which is all I've got to go on really, it looks like most systems that are using the current EVAs are demanding ~9000 IOPS with a mixed workload of 70/30 R/W.So I was thinking of a requirement that said something like: The primary array shall be capable of delivering a minimum of 9000 IOPS for a simulated mixed workload of random 70/30 Read/Writes using a 4K sample block size over a 1TB RAID5 volume at a latency of <10ms during all system functions including snapshot operations.
Trouble is, I have no real world experience of storage array performance. I don't know if this is actually good, bad or average. Should a 3PAR with the the number and type of disks I've configured be delivering significantly more than this with this kind of test workload or would that be reasonable performance?