HP MSA 2040 Storage (2015) review
HP new Gen4 MSA 2040 delivers enterprise storage virtualisation at an SMB price
HP’s new virtualisation features make one of the best SMB storage arrays on the market even better. The MSA 2040 is easy to deploy and the automated data tiering features boost performance and lower storage costs
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Automated data tiering; Converged FC/IP SAN data ports; Top value, High expansion; Excellent performance
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New web console takes some getting used to; virtual volumes only support manual snapshots
The new hardware
The 2U chassis is available with 12 LFF or 24 hot-swap SFF hard disks. HP offers a wide choice of drives including enterprise SAS, NL-SAS, SSDs and self-encrypting drives but SATA isn't supported.
The new converged SAN controllers in our review system support both 8/16Gbps Fibre Channel and 10GbE iSCSI. Each controller has four SFP+ ports grouped in two pairs so you just pop the transceivers of your choice in either pair which automatically sets their personality.
HP also offers a 4-port 12Gb/sec SAS controller model and all versions have 4GB of on-board cache memory protected by a super-capacitor and CompactFlash card. Expansion potential hasn't changed from the previous generation but is still very high with support for seven disk enclosures and up to 96 LFF and 199 SFF drives.
The new SMU v3 console provide a clear overview of storage pools, disk groups and tiers
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