3PAR
As we know that virtualization is catching the market very
fast and because of that hardware is getting virtualized and so the different vendor’s
products are also making their technology to adopt the virtual environment to
survive in the market. As we know the server market is very much affected by
this virtualization technology and somewhat of storage market is getting
affected by virtualization technology,
In almost every vendor or partner event I have seen that
there is lot of discussion about the virtualization and they will show that how
their new product or existing product is capable of adopting the virtual
environment, as we all know the EMC, NetApp product are already adopted the
virtual environment and saved their market value. And now the 3PAR is also
working hard to adopt the virtual environment.
So today I will be discussing about the 3PAR storage and
their solution to this virtual environment. We will see that what 3PAR is
having in their pocket for customer so that they can sell their storage in
virtual environment.
3PAR storage has two major products line the InServ
T-Class and F-Class storage array. As we all know that the 3PAR is acquired by
HP Company.
Based on the InSpire architecture, 3PAR storage array are
widely installed in medium to large enterprise customers. InSpire provides a
highly scalable, yet tremendously flexible, storage architecture that fits
quite well into virtual server environments. Fine-grained virtualization divides
physical disks into granular “chunklets”, which can be dynamically assigned (and
later re-assigned) to virtual volumes of different quality of service (QoS)
levels. This enables 3PAR to efficiently satisfy varying user-defined performance,
availability and cost levels, and to adapt quickly and non –disruptively to
evolving application workloads.
One of the 3PAR good storage intelligence technologies
which are keeping the 3PAR separate from other storage vendors is their “THIN
PERSISTENCE”.
This thin persistence helps users to reclaim the unused
space resulting from deleted data within the volume. This is really a good and
intelligence work of 3PAR storage as I have seen in NetApp and other storage
vendors that once the some data is added in the thin volumes that much space is
taken from the aggr or from storage pool but when we delete some data from the
thin volumes that particular amount of space does not get added back to the
aggr or storage pool, and that what the thin persistence do. So it helps user
to reclaim back their unused space from the deleted data within the thin
volumes.
Another good technology of the 3PAR storage is thin copy
reclamation. When a copy of a volume needs to be made, using either 3PAR
virtual copy (non-duplicative copy –on-write snapshots) or 3PAR Remote copy
(thin provisioning- aware, data replication for DR purpose), 3PAR thin copy
reclamation recovers any unused space, such as that associated with deleted
data, during the copy operation. This has an especially big impact in
streamlining copies of fat volumes, which tend to have a lot of wasted space
that would otherwise be replicated in each successive copy.
The other interesting technology of 3PAR is the thin
conversion, which applies a fat –to –thin conversion capability during the
migration process. All of 3PAR thin
technologies take advantage of hardware –based functionality built in to the
3PAR Gen3 ASIC to ensure that the “capacity thinning” operations take place
without impacting application performance of user response times.
3PAR recovery Manager for VMware vSphere comes in.
Packaged in InForm software along with the 3PAR Management Plug-In for VMware
vCentre , 3PAR recovery Manager enables users to create hundreds of
space-efficient , point- in-time snapshots online in an InServ array, without
disrupting the performance of other running VMs. The product allows users to
snap and recover everything from VM images snap and recover everything from VMImages
to specific virtual server files and directories.
