3PAR

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.