During our HP Tech Day late last week, we had someone take notes of the sessions. These notes provide a summary of what was discussed. Also in this post is videos of the sessions described.
HP 3PAR Overview
Jim "JR" Richardson
The 3PAR customer presentation focuses on three words: Multi-tenant, Efficient, Autonomic. These perfectly describe what HP 3PAR does in your converged storage. But sometimes the meaning of those words get lost so JR talked about their meaning.
Multitenant has been the goal for a long time, but has been expensive and hard to change and siloed inside the sheet metal. So open systems exploded because less expensive and easier. We saw SANs come together to try to pull them all in. We saw virtualized storage. But you need is a ground-up approach to a platform that can handle lots of apps without worrying about what the front end asks, you just deliver it.
This is the perfect fit for orgs with diverse workloads to handle large and small blocks without major surgery on the infrastructure. One of the key technologies is an ASIC. If you have lots of small random ops you should strike that across resources. Bigger assets, you need a bigger pipe. ASIC gives you big bandwidth, low latency, big pipe to strike the data across all the controllers without a penalty and sends data where it needs to go in the cluster. It does RAID-5, 6 XOR (exclusive OR) calculations. We built in provisioning into ASIC; CPUs can think about where the data goes.
3PAR can grab “chunklets” -- small amounts of data until it’s striped across as many disks as it needs; every other controller does the same across however many disks. Does it in less than 10 seconds. From the core up, the way 3PAR does things is agnostic to thin or not thin. It’s mixed workload – multitenancy.
Efficient: 3PAR didn’t invent thin provisioning, but it did revolutionize storage industry. Now every major vendor has some thin provisioning, though sometimes it’s bolted on. 3PAR is much more efficient than, say, Hitachi or EMC, at 16KB allocation. You don’t have any predefined pools; you have a policy of how storage should be consumed. No pre-allocation, so you don’t need to think too much about management.
Autonomic: If you climb some stairs, automatically your heart rate goes up. You don’t have to think about it, it just adjusts – it’s autonomic! Same way, the array has a bunch of smarts built into it that removes the smarts of the user! (laughter). Takes out the drudge work; performance, stripe settings are automatically set to give you the best performance. Can also monitor what’s going on; the busy bits will go to fast storage, less actives goes to slow.
The 3PAR architecture is not cache-centric. The thinking is geared to not having a large cache. Rarely hits limits on CPUs.
You can learn more about HP 3PAR at www.hp.com/go/3PAR
File-based portfolio overview
Jim Hankins, product manager
There are two families of products:
Mark Thomas, architect introduces the IBRIX X9000; 3 products in the portfolio:
IBRIX software is a single namespace that allows you to tier: Fast storage, slow storage; policy-based storage lets you decide where storage should reside during it's lifecycle.
Scale-out storage environment: across the product line you can continue to grow and grow the classifications of storage you need and still provide a single file system segmented across the storage.
Transparent Data Tiering
Enterprise Data Services:
Robert Thompson Architect
X5000 G2 Network Storage System: Converged Storage optimized for file serving
Connectivity
To learn more about the file based portfolio go to www.hp.com/go/NAS
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