Anyone using Invista?

We use the USPV from HDS to virtualize some tier 2 storage for replication purposes and it works well enough, but the licenses(HUR and virtualization) bring the cost of tier 2 disk almost up to tier 1 levels. We also tested the IBM SVC and found it lacking.

We've just went production with Invista, after the install two weeks ago. We've not has much trouble, all in all I¿m very happy with it.

One small problem was, when moving our Cisco MDS switches into the Invista smart switches, tftp stopped working. We had to create a rule on the smart switches to allow the traffic.

Data mobility has worked really well; we¿ve moved volumes from expensive dmx storage to low cost cx3 SATA drives (dumps, backups, etc) online with no impact.

At first, it was a bit cumbersome to use - but after getting more comfortable with it, it¿s been great.

The only real problem we've ran into, is when we tried to DM a volume on a Linux server - the server lost the volume group. I've not opened a case yet.

I have been using it in my environment since March 2008. It took us a few months to be ready to start using it. Mosts of our hosts were only attached a single, meshed fabric. So, we spent a lot of time adding HBA's to hosts upgrading Powerpath, drivers, etc so we could have truly redundant fabrics. I purchased new CX3 arrays at the end of last year and I used Invista to migrate data off of my CX700s onto the CX3-40s and CX3-80s using Data Mobility jobs.

I moved most of my data using 2.0 patch 3. I am now running 2.1 patch 3 which includes a feature which allows you to specify the exact rate that the DM job will run at. In 2.0 it was low, med, high, and ASAP. High was too slow and ASAP was too fast.

I am virtulizing about 100TB of data on two CX3-80s and a CX3-40. I have approximately 50 hosts behind it. They are all Windows 2003.

I plan on eventually adding my 25TB of VMWare ESX LUNS, but if I don't use Storage VMotion, it will require me to down my entire ESX farm at the same time to migrate the LUNS and hosts to the new VSANS. So, I'm waiting for the VMWare admin to get us up to ESX 3.5 so we can use storage VMotion.

Invista has simplified my storage provisioning and allowed me to migrate my data off old arrays onto new without downtime. However, I have invested most of 2008 in getting ready for Invista, migrating hosts and data into Invista, and migrating the data. It is not a simple procedure. In my opinion, the architecture adds a lot of complexity to an otherwise simple SAN environment.

shewitt,
Thanks for posting here. I saw in a post of yours in the CLARiiON forum that you mentioned using Invista and I have been meaning to ask you to share your experiences with it. I have a similar environment, two Cx700s, a Cx3-80, a Cx3-20, and a DMX-4 with about 70 windows hosts on Cisco MDS based fabric.

We are already running RecoverPoint using the SANTap fabric splitter which uses the same type of SSM line cards as Invista (I know we will have to purchase dedicated ones for Invista), so am already a little familiar with the virtualization layer that the fabric based services bring to the SAN fabric.

What was the driving factor in deciding to use Invista? For the size of your environment was the cost of the product justified in your opinion? Just curious as I have looked at SVC and another Invista-like product that uses Cisco SSM line cards for storage virtualization as well (I forgot the name of the company, will have to dig it up).

Thanks,
Aran

Thanks for sharing Shewitt. You pretty much summed up the main values I see Invista adding to our environment. Array migrations are a pain and the virtualization layer across arrays would give us an all encompassing virtualization instead of individual array virtualizations, which I am trying to avoid.

We are going to be implementing it starting next Monday, we are going to use it mainly to migrate from a DMX3000 to a CX4, but I hope to use it in production, and also we are going to be moving datacenters in the next 18 months, so utilizing Invista to help us migrate data from one datacenter to another might be very helpful.

Dave ..it would be awesome if you could come back and share your hands-on experience with deployment, support ..etc of Invista.

sure, i also took the 3 day class in Milford,MA back in November, we will be install version 2.2 patch 1 . We will be using PPME to migrate off of Linux boxes, and doing a host based migration for our HPUX machines. I am hoping there will be some discussions at EMC world this year like there was last year.

Well we got invista 2.2 patch 1 installed, we are migrating a linux Xen host over to it currently, and i have just finished carving new storage for exchange on our CX4 and presented it to invista. so in the next few weeks our production exchange servers will have their storage under Invista.

Our Linux Xen migration went great, we used native LVM software to do it live without taking any downtime, Our exchange servers will be migrated over to Invista as soon as my Exchange admin gets his plan together and we get some downtime.

Did anything have to happen on the linux side when you used data mobility on it's invista lun?

we did not use DM on the Linux side, we used Linux LVM to move the data from a Symm to a CX.