HP EVA4400 support for big LUNs, no thanks

I was part of project for upgrading an EVA4400 with FC drives, which currently has only FATA drives. The final task was to have equal count of FATA and FC drives in the system (8 cages). Because the FATA group was not fully allocated we've decided to create a FC group with some drives and using the snapclone functionality replicate the LUNs from FATA group to FC group. Later we would delete the FATA disk group, group more FC drives and create new FATA disk group with less drives.

Going with this setup I've decided to see for how long one LUN would be replicated and make the calculations. Then guess what, I've got a message saying that we cannot create snapclone of the disk because it's too big, the LUN was just a little bigger than the 2TB. This EVA was upgraded with the latest firmware which gives you the ability to create LUNs up to 32TB. It was already written in the release notes, although with different words:

• Virtual disk size. Create virtual disks (LUNs) that are larger than 2 TB (maximum of 32 TB). You can only create, present, and delete virtual disks that are 2 TB or greater. You cannot perform replication tasks or extend and shrink virtual disks that are 2 TB or greater.

So what happens if I have a database running on top of 5TB LUN and I want to create a snapshot, for reporting let's say ... it would be just impossible.

Vdisk size must be an integer between 1 and 2047 in order this functionallity to work, otherwise you'll get the following error:

Operation failed! The requested operation is not currently support by the installed firmware for luns 2TB in size. I'm not completely sure if this issue exists in EVA6/8400. Regards, Sve