1. HP 3PAR Utility Storage
Benefits Summary
Next-Generation Storage for Virtual and Cloud Data Centers
WHITE PAPER
Table of contents
What experts are saying...................................................................................................................... 2
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 3
What is utility storage? ........................................................................................................................ 3
Reducing CAPEX................................................................................................................................. 5
OPEX savings ................................................................................................................................... 13
Greater ROI for applications and services ............................................................................................ 16
Conclusions...................................................................................................................................... 19
2. What experts are saying
ESG Lab’s hands-on testing has confirmed that 3PAR has developed a solution that can not only
reduce provisioning time by up to 90% as compared to traditional storage systems that use wizards,
but which works with any high-availability cluster, database cluster, or virtual server environment.
–Tony Palmer, Enterprise Strategy Group Lab
3PAR has delivered a confluence of high-end features, advanced virtualization, and attractive
cost-of-ownership to the high-end storage market. What’s more, 3PAR has brought this exciting
combination to the midrange market as well.
– Laura DuBois, IDC Program Vice President, Storage Software and Solutions
As competition heats up, cloud service providers must rein in capital and operating costs while
retaining the ability to scale to meet unpredictable but potentially massive data storage requirements.
Thin provisioning in HP 3PAR Utility Storage does this most efficiently and provides the needed agility
to operate at large scale.
–Mike Kahn, Managing Director, The Clipper Group
The design of all 3PAR systems provide optimal performance to the random I/O workloads driving
today’s growing application mix….Features such as thin provisioning and wide striping were the
primary design points for 3PAR, not added as an afterthought to a legacy architecture.
– Russ Fellows, Evaluator Group
The incumbency of 3PAR Utility Storage in the global service provider market—with many of the
world’s top service providers relying on 3PAR Utility Storage for their cloud-based service
offerings—makes it a valuable addition to the CSA.
–Jim Reavis, Cloud Security Alliance
Basically 3PAR took thin provisioning and the other storage management features that won high
grades for their enterprise systems and brought those features down to the midrange with the F-Class
series. The timing was good, as 3PAR had just recently upgraded its high-end T-Class platform with
new features that came down to the F-Class, such as mesh-active quad-controller technology, thin
provisioning, ASIC and new management software for 3PAR's thin technologies.
–Dave Raffo, Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com
2
2
3. Introduction
The growth and use of information has outpaced traditional storage technologies whose fundamental
designs are in some cases now decades old. In many cases, the limited scalability and functionality of
these outdated storage platforms have forced organizations to cobble together storage infrastructures
with multiple layers of interlocking hardware and software. This perpetuates not only IT sprawl, but
prevents businesses from becoming what HP calls “instant-on.” The Instant-On Enterprise serves
customers, employees, partners, and citizens with precisely what they want and need, precisely when
they need it—instantly, at any point in time, and through any channel. It uses technology to integrate
and automate the value chain. It adapts easily and innovates rapidly. It manages risk and
environmental responsibilities. Behind the scenes, the Instant-On Enterprise streamlines everything that
is required to deliver a service.
Escalating investment in storage management and SAN purchases ultimately frustrating efforts to
consolidate, simplify, virtualize, and achieve cost-efficiency through realizing a converged
infrastructure that is at the heart of the Instant-On Enterprise. The continuing trends toward server and
client virtualization only serve to amplify the rigidity of technology silos, the complexity of legacy
application architectures, and the inefficiency of traditional storage arrays.
Virtualization is transforming data centers and the businesses they fuel. This shift is placing new
demands on infrastructure that legacy storage platforms were never designed to handle. A converged
infrastructure holds the keys to enabling organizations to overcome the inflexibility and high costs
created by IT sprawl in order to have the freedom to shift resources away from operations in favor of
fostering innovation and driving strategic initiatives that will grow the business. A fundamental
element of this strategy is the deployment of a storage infrastructure that addresses the specific needs
of virtual and cloud data centers with the fundamental flexibility to handle not only today’s demands,
but to serve as the foundation for a data center transformation with the power to poise that data
center for what comes next. While there is indeed no way to “future-proof” the data center, there are
certainly actions that can be taken today to maximize infrastructure efficiency and to build in the
agility necessary to meet even rapidly changing business demands.
HP 3PAR Utility Storage was built from the ground up to exceed the economic and operational
requirements of even the most demanding and dynamic IT environments, and to support a converged
infrastructure by providing the SAN performance, scalability, and availability that clients need to
transform their data centers. The next generation of Tier 1 storage, HP 3PAR Utility Storage delivers
100% of the agility and efficiency demanded by virtual data centers and cloud computing
environments. It does this through an innovative system architecture that offers secure multi-tenancy,
built-in thin processing capabilities, and autonomic management and storage tiering features that are
unique in the industry.
What is utility storage?
Utility storage is a category of storage systems developed to support the “on-demand” utility
computing model that first introduced the concept of delivering IT resources as a service, much like a
public utility (such as water, electricity, and natural gas). Utility storage systems were developed to not
only deliver storage as if it were a utility—by enabling users to buy only what they need and pay for
only what they use—but to support the broader goals of delivering IT as a Service (ITaaS) and helping
businesses become “instant-on.” By far, the form of utility computing that receives the most attention
today is cloud computing, a service delivery model that leverages the Internet instead of using a
specific network—a condition that adds the new requirement of massive infrastructure scalability and
security.
The leading global provider of utility storage, 3PAR and its unique technologies were acquired by HP
in 2010. With particularly strong adoption within the hosting and enterprise cloud computing
markets, prior to this acquisition 3PAR was also ranked as the preferred utility storage vendor to 7 of
the world’s top 10 revenue-generating managed service providers1. The platform’s delivery of secure
multi-tenancy was a particularly important element of this success. In addition, the company’s utility
storage arrays continually achieved high marks from both enterprise and service provider clients for
1
Tier 1 Research, “Winter 2009 Managed Hosting Report,”16 December 2008.
3
4. providing green storage advantages, with 95% of users recommending 3PAR arrays as a strategic
component of any green IT initiative2.
The green advantages of the HP 3PAR Utility Storage platform were a direct result of improved
efficiency, including the elimination of unnecessary storage capacity purchases, increased utilization
of the storage capacity that is purchased, and thin copy technologies to eliminate the needless
replication of empty space. According to Arun Taneja, Founder of the Taneja Group, the platform’s
pioneering introduction of thin provisioning and thin copy technologies within open-systems storage
arrays, combined with its administrative simplicity, was responsible for bringing to market a business
model that changed the cost structure of storage and paved the way for new Hardware- and
Software-as-a-Service offerings, Web 2.0 innovation, and cloud computing3.
As part of the HP Converged Infrastructure, HP 3PAR Utility Storage helps promote infrastructure
efficiency and agility, enabling clients to overcome the inflexibility and high costs of IT sprawl so that
resources can be shifted toward innovation and strategic initiatives instead of operations. The
integration of HP 3PAR Utility Storage with HP CloudSystem and HP BladeSystem Matrix provides
clients with a simplified way to provision and scale storage for public and private cloud environments.
The combination of the HP X9300 Network Storage Gateway (based on IBRIX technology) and HP
3PAR Storage Systems helps clients gain control over massive amounts of unstructured file data by
enabling file and block data access on a consolidated storage infrastructure.
Whether deployed on its own or in combination with other HP storage products and solutions, the
efficiency and agility benefits of HP 3PAR Utility Storage can be grouped into three broad categories:
• Reduced capital expense (CAPEX)
• Reduced operating expense (OPEX)
• Greater return on investment (ROI) for applications and services
This paper discusses these benefits in detail by exploring the unique advantages and benefits of the
HP 3PAR Utility Storage platform.
2
Based on a 2009 survey of 3PAR customers performed by TechValidate (www.techvalidate.com).
3
3PAR Inc., “3PAR Celebrates a Decade of Innovation,” press release, 27 May 2009,
http://www.3par.com/about_us_overview/news_events/press_releases/20090527.html (1 March 2011).
4
5. Reducing CAPEX
With the efficiency and agility of HP 3PAR Utility Storage, clients do not need to overprovision
capacity to get the flexibility they need either today or in the future. Designed to deliver massive
consolidation and scalability, HP 3PAR Utility Storage allows clients to reduce storage infrastructure
while gaining the ability to respond rapidly to changing business needs. With HP 3PAR Utility
Storage, clients can:
• Start small and scale smartly: With HP 3PAR Storage Systems, users can start with a small,
cost-efficient footprint, avoiding the cost premiums associated with monolithic arrays. The unique HP
3PAR Architecture also allows users to scale in a granular and independent way to deliver higher
performance, greater capacity, or more connectivity when and where it is needed. And since
elements of the HP 3PAR Architecture are common across the entire platform, HP 3PAR Utility
Storage delivers maximum investment protection as business needs grow.
All HP 3PAR Storage Systems feature a unique Mesh-Active controller technology as part of a
next-generation storage architecture designed for virtual and cloud data centers. This Mesh-Active
design combines the benefits of monolithic and modular architectures while eliminating price
premiums and scaling complexities. Unlike legacy “active-active” controller architectures—where a
storage volume is active on only a single controller—this design allows each volume to be active on
every mesh controller in the system. The result is an architecture that delivers robust, load-balanced
performance and greater headroom for cost-effective scalability, overcoming the tradeoffs typically
associated with modular and monolithic storage.
• Purchase less storage infrastructure: HP 3PAR Utility Storage enables massive consolidation
through secure multi-tenancy that enables clients to support multiple external or internal customers
(user groups, departments, business units, lines of business, etc.) from a single, consolidated storage
array. The key to this capability is the platform’s highly flexible and secure Virtual Private Array
(VPA) technology and high-performance, massively load-balanced architecture. The result is a
simple, efficient, and scalable approach to delivering secure segregation within a consolidated
platform and without performance tradeoffs.
5
6. With HP 3PAR Virtual Domains Software, clients can deliver secure administrative segregation of
users and hosts within a consolidated, massively parallel HP 3PAR Storage System, allowing
individual user groups and applications to leverage the high-performance architecture of HP 3PAR
Storage Systems to achieve greater storage service levels (performance, availability, and
functionality). Virtual Domains enables IT organizations to deliver customized, secure, and even
“self-service” storage to multiple administrators, applications, departments, or user groups while
retaining the efficiency benefits of storage consolidation. It enables service providers to be more
competitive by offering shared storage options without compromising security or service levels.
With HP 3PAR Utility Storage, application-tailored volumes with assured and measurable service
levels enable the centralization of volume management activities, which reduces the requirement
to purchase multiple host-based volume management software licenses. Clients can also simplify,
delay, or eliminate complex SAN infrastructures with the enormous connectivity potential and
built-in LUN security of HP 3PAR Storage Systems, which allow users to connect directly to more
than a hundred physical host servers and to eliminate switching layers associated with “fanning-out”
to storage devices4.
Purchase storage capacity only for written data: Today’s storage arrays often force users
to provision storage in odd or over-sized amounts, or hold large amounts of storage in reserve for
future uses. This can result in large pockets of unutilized capacity. HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning
Software allows users to safely allocate more storage capacity to host applications than has
actually been purchased. This means that clients can eliminate physical disk purchases immediately
and postpone them indefinitely—until capacity is physically required. HP 3PAR Utility Storage takes
a reservationless, dedicate-on-write approach to thin provisioning that enables the platform’s thin
software applications to draw and configure capacity in fine-grained increments from a single free
space reservoir without prior dedication of any kind. Other vendors claim to offer thin provisioning
but actually require separate thin provisioning pools for each data service level. Such pools are
silos of allocated-but-unused capacity that can require manual setup, provisioning, and
management that decreases thin provisioning return on investment (ROI) and flexibility.
In addition, HP 3PAR InForm Operating System Software (InForm OS) improves capacity efficiency
by allowing a given application to use fine-grained portions of hundreds of drives—a feature which
also has performance benefits discussed later. The system uses sub-disk virtualization to divide each
physical disk into granular allocation units, each of which can be independently assigned and
dynamically reassigned to virtual volumes of different QoS levels. These chunklets are selected and
grouped to meet user-defined levels of performance, cost, and availability—varying such
parameters as RAID level, drive type, radial placement, and stripe width. This fine-grained
virtualization means that each disk drive can support many QoS levels, enabling HP 3PAR Storage
Systems to use physical assets in the most efficient manner possible. Fine-grained virtualization also
delivers the flexibility to respond to changing application workloads quickly and non-disruptively so
organizations have the agility to meet dynamic business needs.
4
The HP 3PAR T800 Storage System supports a maximum of 128 direct Fibre Channel host connections.
6
7. • Only copy what has changed: On legacy storage arrays, when “fat” volumes are copied, the
extra space within those volumes is also copied. As if this weren’t enough, volume copies created
for data recovery purposes can compound this waste by replicating the empty space yet again. The
resulting inefficiency is a serious challenge, particularly in virtual server and virtual desktop
deployments where large amounts of capacity are typically required at the outset. HP 3PAR Virtual
Copy Software allows clients to take capacity-minimizing, non-duplicative, copy-on-write snapshots
of data. This represents a significant savings in capacity purchases versus the use of traditional full
physical copies. Virtual Copy’s fine-grained auto-growth capability also makes it more efficient than
other copy-on-write technologies, which, in addition to duplicating unused space, require
conservative reservations of copy space.
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8. HP 3PAR Remote Copy Software leverages Virtual Copy for remote replication and disaster
recovery and is “thin-aware,” so target volumes provide the same cost and ease-of-use benefits as
thin source volumes. With the combination of HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software and HP 3PAR
Remote Copy Software, both primary and remote sites can share in the benefits of allocating
volumes just once while consuming only necessary physical capacity. The result is unprecedented
efficiency in data replication.
8
9. As an example of this efficiency, consider a scenario where an application user requests 30 TB of
capacity with a traditional storage array. If we assume a 33% capacity utilization rate, actual
written data only amounts to approximately 10 TB. With traditional RAID 1 mirroring, the 30 TB
request translates into 60 TB of raw capacity required. Include remote data replication, and now
the required capacity expands to 120 TB raw. All of this capacity is required for only 10 TB of
actual written application data. With HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software and HP 3PAR Remote
Copy Software, capacity is required only when an application writes data, so by comparison, only
40 TB of raw capacity is needed to support the user’s request, RAID 1 protection, and remote data
replication. This is a savings of 80 TB or roughly 67% of the capacity otherwise required with
legacy solutions.
• Save 50% on a technology refresh, guaranteed: The HP 3PAR Gen3 ASIC inside each HP
3PAR Storage System features a silicon-based, zero-detection mechanism for converting “fat”
volumes to "thin" volumes without impacting storage performance. This technology—known as Thin
Built In—leverages a unique, software-based virtualization mapping engine for space reclamation
that works with HP 3PAR Thin Conversion Software to remove allocated but unused space in
existing storage volumes. HP 3PAR Utility Storage is the only storage platform with this fat-to-thin
processing capability built into its system hardware5. With the HP 3PAR Get Thin Guarantee, new
clients deploying HP 3PAR Storage Systems and HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning and Thin Conversion
Software as part of a storage technology refresh are guaranteed to halve the amount of capacity
required to store their data, or HP will make up the difference with free disk capacity and related
software and support6.
• Shrink RAID protection overhead: HP 3PAR Utility Storage offers hardware-accelerated,
hyper-efficient Fast RAID 5 and RAID 6 (also known as RAID Multi-Parity, or RAID MP) on all
storage system models. Fast RAID 5 boosts RAID 5 performance to within 10% of RAID 17 but with
5
See the “HP 3PAR Thin Technologies Solution Brief” for details:
http://www.3par.com/SiteObjects/E79E9D14AE7ACA31541DDEA841E2BC91/4AA3-2545ENW.pdf
6
Eligibility for the Get Thin Guarantee program is subject to acceptance of a Get Thin Offer containing the Terms and satisfaction of those Terms.
Contact your sales representative for full details
7
RAID 1 mirroring requires 100% capacity overhead; RAID 5 (3+1) only consumes 33% more capacity for a 67% savings.
9
10. significantly less capacity overhead.8 HP 3PAR RAID MP introduces Fast RAID 6 technology backed
by the accelerated performance and rapid RAID rebuild capabilities of the HP 3PAR Gen3 ASIC.
RAID MP delivers this enhanced protection while maintaining performance levels within 15% of
RAID 10 and with capacity overheads comparable to popular RAID 5 modes.9
• Purchase fewer arrays to get the job done: Traditionally, organizations have been forced
to purchase additional arrays to meet application service level requirements and for cost
optimization of data. With the InForm OS, the massively parallel and fine-grained striping of data
across internal resources assures high and predictable levels of service for all workload types to
enable clients to consolidate with confidence. At the same time, autonomic tiering capabilities and
support for multiple drive types enable clients to achieve an optimal balance of price and
performance for multiple types of data within a single, cost-efficient array.
– Performance advantages
With HP 3PAR Utility Storage, data is striped widely across all system resources (controllers,
cache, disks, and loops) to leverage fine-grained virtualization capabilities and provide superior
performance. This is particularly important in virtual server and virtual desktop environments,
where storage is often the performance bottleneck. With the InForm OS, wide striping enables the
system to collectively leverage resources across all disk and controller resources to eliminate
tradeoffs between utilization and performance. Even the smallest volumes can leverage the
performance of 50 or 100 disk drives and all of the system’s clustered Controller Nodes for
optimal performance without compromising utilization—something that can’t be said about
manual performance boosting techniques such as “short stroking.”
The HP 3PAR Architecture also features mixed workload support that enables transaction- and
throughput-intensive workloads to run without contention on a single storage system without
manual segregation of workloads to different physical resources. This capability is a key enabler
of multi-tenancy, and eliminates the need to purchase and maintain separate arrays to support
individual applications. The resulting alleviation of data center sprawl can reduce storage
footprint by 50% or more.
8
3PAR Inc. and Oracle Corporation, “Simplified Database Storage Management That Lowers Management Costs and Yields High Storage
Utilization,” April 2008, http://www.3par.com/SiteObjects/FAD0993865AC1636B4E2A3CEF6B64131/oracle_3par_wp_final_0.pdf (1
March 2011).
9
Based on internal 3PAR testing using RAID 6 (6+2).
10
11. – Autonomic storage tiering
HP 3PAR Utility Storage features unique autonomic storage tiering capabilities that reduce costs
while delivering the agility and efficiency to meet changing and unpredictable workloads in even
the most demanding virtual and cloud data centers. The platform’s autonomic approach to service
level optimization is designed to pair data with the most cost-effective resource capable of
meeting service level requirements at any given time, giving organizations the agility to react
quickly to changing application and infrastructure requirements with total confidence. Clients can
achieve service level targets at the lowest possible cost while increasing infrastructure agility and
minimizing the risks typically associated with moving data between storage tiers.
Traditional approaches to service level optimization rely on static, application-level tiering. Key
limitations of this approach include: complexity; inability to move data without downtime or
service level impacts; and time-consuming planning, configuration, and migration. HP 3PAR
Dynamic Optimization Software offers non-disruptive, autonomic workload rebalancing across HP
3PAR Storage Systems. With Dynamic Optimization, application volumes are non-disruptively
distributed and redistributed across tiers to align application requirements with data QoS levels
on demand.
HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization Software leverages the same fine-grained data movement
engine as Dynamic Optimization but applies it to independent regions within a volume. The result
is highly reliable, non-disruptive autonomic tiered storage that delivers the right QoS to the right
data at the right time to meet service level targets for the lowest possible cost.
With Adaptive Optimization, HP 3PAR Storage Systems are also able to deliver high
performance levels in even the most challenging environments using an extremely lean Solid State
Drive (SSD) tier in combination with highly affordable Nearline (Enterprise SATA) drives. At any
given time, only the most performance-intensive data is placed onto SSDs, meaning that service
level targets can be met with a minimal number of these premium drives. Meanwhile, the
ability to stripe writes widely across all system resources, combined with abundantly scalable
levels of performance, enables the use of highly cost-efficient Nearline drives to meet broader
capacity requirements. This combination of HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization Software, SSDs, and
widely striped SATA drives delivers a savings of up to 30% over the cost of using Fibre Channel
drives alone.10
10
Savings based on the comparison of an HP 3PAR T400 Storage System configured with 320 x 300-GB 15K Fibre Channel drives and an HP
3PAR T400 Storage System configured with 24 x 50-GB Solid State Drives and 96 x 1-TB Serial ATA drives using HP 3PAR Adaptive
Optimization Software.
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12. • Spend less on remote replication and disaster recovery: HP 3PAR Remote Copy
Software allows clients to protect and share data from any application more simply, efficiently, and
affordably. Remote Copy dramatically reduces the cost of remote data replication and disaster on
several fronts: by leveraging virtual and thin copy technologies unique to HP 3PAR Utility
Storage; by enabling the use of a combination of mid-range and high-end arrays; by eliminating
costly professional services engagements; and by providing both Fibre Channel and native
IP-over-Ethernet support so clients are not forced to convert or extend Fibre Channel connections
with expensive devices. Unique to HP 3PAR Remote Copy, the Synchronous Long Distance
replication mode gives clients an affordable, multi-site alternative for achieving low Recovery Time
Objectives (RTOs) and zero-data-loss Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) with complete distance
flexibility. Synchronous Long Distance replication combines the best of both worlds by offering the
data integrity of synchronous mode disaster recovery and the extended distances (including
cross-continental reach) possible with asynchronous replication.
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13. OPEX savings
According to Gartner, not only does operational spending consistently account for a higher
percentage of overall IT spending on a global scale than do capital expenses, but in 2009-2010,
operational expenses rose while capital expenditures fell.11 HP 3PAR Utility Storage lowers operating
expenses year after year by optimizing storage efficiency and maintaining it autonomically.
Simplified management reduces storage administration while thin replication technologies enable thin
capacity to stay thin over time to maximize the ongoing cost benefits of deploying thin storage. These
savings allow clients to maintain a sustained focused on innovation rather than operations. With HP
3PAR Utility Storage, clients can:
• Reduce storage footprint: The ultra-dense Controller Nodes and Drive Chassis of HP 3PAR
Storage Systems, combined with Mixed workload support and autonomic tiering enable clients to
consolidate onto fewer arrays, that consume less real estate and thus cost less to house. This
footprint reduction is particularly important for cost control when leasing data center space, and for
data centers located in highly dense urban areas such as London and New York City, where real
estate and power resources are limited and controlling data center sprawl is crucial to keeping
operating costs down.
Capacity reduction using HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software and HP 3PAR Thin Conversion
software further reduce storage requirements to conserve precious data center floor space and save
on operating costs related to housing storage equipment. In addition, for multiple-cabinet systems,
no adjacency requirements and the ability to place individual cabinets up to 100 meters apart
eliminate the need for costly data center space reservations and planning when using HP 3PAR
Storage Systems. This allows customers to reduce operating expenses by squeezing every inch out
of their data centers.
• Maximize administrative efficiency: Most arrays available today require as many as 30
steps just to provision a single volume, and involve burdensome restrictions that users must
remember to ensure proper capacity planning. The InForm OS provides dramatically simplified,
autonomic provisioning and management that relieves users of tedious planning chores and reduces
the potential for error. With HP 3PAR Storage Systems, there is no pre-planning, and provisioning is
cut to just two steps that can be completed in less than 15 seconds. With HP 3PAR Thin
Provisioning Software, users can provision just once for the lifetime of an application. This
represents a dramatic savings, year after year.
The multi-dimensional scalability of HP 3PAR Storage Systems, coupled with the ease-of-use and
autonomic management capabilities built into the InForm OS, allow clients to achieve more with
less. Competing systems require customers to manage complex and layered storage infrastructures
composed of multiple storage devices, switches, and host elements—all with their related
management software. When multiplied by the typical activities of any storage environment and the
need to maintain compatibility between the many levels of hardware and software, management
and training for such an environment can be daunting, time consuming, and expensive.
In comparison, HP 3PAR Utility Storage has been shown to improve administrative efficiency tenfold
by reducing administration time by up to 90%.12 For example, HP 3PAR Rapid Provisioning
eliminates array planning by delivering instant, application-tailored, autonomic provisioning
through the fine-grained virtualization of lower-level components. Provisioning is managed
intelligently and automatically while striping of data across internal resources assures high and
predictable service levels for all workload types. Now three clicks and 60 seconds are all that is
needed to fully create and provision multiple volumes to multiple hosts.13
11
Gartner, Inc., “IT Metrics: IT Spending and Staffing Report, 2011,” 25 January, 2011.
12
Based on documented client results that are subject to unique business conditions, client IT environment, HP products deployed, and other
factors. These results may not be typical; your results may vary.
13
Based on the use of HP 3PAR Autonomic Groups Software, which is provided as part of the HP 3PAR InForm Operating System Software.
13
14. The latest version of the HP 3PAR Management Console is fully integrated with signature HP 3PAR
applications such as HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning, Virtual Copy, Dynamic Optimization, Virtual
Domains, and Remote Copy Software so that it consolidates all the tools that clients need to
provision, manage, optimize, and protect their entire utility storage deployment from a single
console. This one console enables administrators to do it all, including: unified management of all
arrays (local and remote; all storage system models, including mid-range and high-end arrays);
multi-site replication set up and tested in just minutes (even using multiple replication modes and
system models); and autonomic disaster recovery configuration.
• Maintain capacity efficiency over time: By dramatically reducing overall capacity
requirements and keeping utilization rates high over time, HP 3PAR thin technologies not only
minimize ongoing storage administration and real estate requirements, but also the cost of
powering, cooling, and managing storage—which are three major contributors to OPEX. Only HP
3PAR Utility Storage features a multifaceted thin storage approach that gives clients the ability to
start thin, get thin, and stay thin.
To optimize the cost savings achieved with Thin Provisioning and Thin Conversion, thin
environments must stay thin, which is where HP 3PAR Thin Persistence and Thin Reclamation
Software come into play. These unique solutions keep thin storage lean and efficient by
autonomically reclaiming free but unused space on an ongoing basis. In addition, for environments
that use VMware vSphere™, Microsoft® Windows® (with SDelete), and Oracle® Database (with the
ASM Storage Reclamation Utility), Thin Persistence can help free significant amounts of stranded
storage. HP 3PAR Utility Storage can also drive additional capacity benefits for environments using
Veritas Storage Foundation™ by Symantec™. The HP 3PAR Thin Persistence Software package
includes HP 3PAR Thin Reclamation Software for Veritas Storage Foundation, which enables the use
of granular file system-level information to autonomically reclaim unused space within thin volumes
so they remain thin over time.
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15. • Reduce server change management costs: Managing patches, new releases, and
parameters for operating systems and applications across multiple servers is a laborious,
error-prone, and capacity-intensive ongoing process. HP 3PAR Utility Storage solves this problem by
allowing users to maintain a few “golden” boot images, and then to distribute these tested images
to countless servers using space-efficient read-write snapshots. Using Virtual Copy, an administrator
can create a golden image—a read-only snapshot of a given operating system or application. This
enables the administrator to then create multiple read-write instances of this image, one for each
server. The writable nature of the image allows simple customization (like unique parameter
settings) to be specified for each server as required. Administrators gain a high degree of
centralized control and a highly scalable solution applicable to multiple servers. The results: rapid,
“bare-metal” provisioning and simplified server patch management.
15
16. Greater ROI for applications and services
For companies in the information business, the potential to generate returns from applications and
services is directly related to the ability to access and serve up data to customers. For service
providers, it’s about getting new clients up and running more quickly or speeding time to market for
new services. For IT organizations, it’s all about new project ROI. HP 3PAR Utility Storage improves
both efficiency and agility to enable enterprise and service provider clients alike to improve return on
investment as compared to competing storage technologies. With HP 3PAR Utility Storage, clients
can:
• Initiate revenue-generating projects sooner: With HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software,
clients are not required to wait until next quarter’s or next year’s budget allocation in order to
deploy additional applications or provision new clients to grow the business. Nor are they required
to wait until needed storage is planned, sized, negotiated, procured, and installed before storage
can be allocated. By maintaining a small buffer of physical capacity, clients can quickly and easily
deploy new applications and services or provision new clients as needed for scheduled use and
when needed for surges in demand. In either case, delays are eliminated and the focus shifted
away from resource procurement to adding value to the business. Capacity is always available to
start new projects, and administrator productivity does not depend on storage purchase, planning,
or installation.
• Accelerate time-to-deployment: Deploying, maintaining, and upgrading mission-critical
applications and services affects the ability to generate revenue and decrease costs. The rapid,
autonomic provisioning capabilities of the InForm OS enable clients to reduce new project
deployment windows and speed time-to-market for new applications and services.
• Reduce planned downtime: In brittle IT environments, growth or change often means
downtime. With HP 3PAR Utility Storage, change management is non-disruptive—making it easy to
upgrade, reconfigure, or reconnect HP 3PAR Storage Systems. Costly and time-consuming data
migrations are also a thing of the past.
• Increase availability: The hardware and software fault tolerance of HP 3PAR Storage Systems
represents a new paradigm in availability measurement. With a clustered architecture that
combines the best of modular and monolithic arrays, high levels of performance can be sustained
even under major component failure conditions.
• Protect against demand volatility: Sustained growth and demand spikes can strain the
attainable service levels of any IT department or service provider. As indicated in the table below,
HP 3PAR Utility Storage improves the level of storage performance by delivering 2 to 6 times
greater performance than competing monolithic or modular arrays. In addition, increasing
performance is non-disruptive and easy to implement. As a result, clients can react quickly to new
opportunities or unplanned demands.
• Maintain business continuity: HP 3PAR Utility Storage delivers fast and economical
application and disaster recovery based on HP 3PAR Virtual Copy and Remote Copy Software.
With Virtual Copy, clients can maintain an archive of frequent online copies of production data
sets. After a database corruption event, administrators can quickly and automatically recover data
from a “clean” copy while retaining a complete set of protected copies. This minimizes the costs of
downtime and improves service levels─efficiently and with reduced chance for error. By backing up
from snapshots, Virtual Copy allows clients to eliminate impact on production servers and, in the
case of SAN-based backups, network resources as well.
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17. HP 3PAR Utility Storage also offers an automated backup solution with database-awareness and
backup server integration that delivers fast, efficient database backup with minimal impact on the
production server. The intelligence and automation of the platform’s data protection solutions
minimize complexity, human resource requirements, and potential errors at critical moments. HP
3PAR Recovery Manager Software for Oracle, HP 3PAR Recovery Manager Software for Microsoft
SQL Server, and HP 3PAR Recovery Manager Software for Exchange are application-aware
snapshot management solutions that ensure complete and consistent snapshot sets. A point-and-click
management console minimizes operator error and speeds time to recovery. For Oracle
environments, additional backup integration is included with Symantec™ NetBackup™, providing
"one-click," non-disruptive, immediate off-host backup.
HP 3PAR Recovery Manager Software for VMware vSphere gives VMware administrators simple
cost-effective control over storage resources and superior granularity when it comes to data
protection and recovery. This plug-in powers the creation of hundreds of VM-aware, point-in-time
snapshots via a simple, automated process for protecting and recovering Virtual Machine Disks
(VMDKs), VMware vStorage Virtual Machine File Systems (VMFS), individual VMs, and even
individual files within VMware vSphere environments.
HP 3PAR GeoCluster Software for Microsoft Windows works with Windows Server Failover
Clustering (WSFC) and HP 3PAR Remote Copy Software to automate application failover and
recovery. As a result, the entire disaster recovery process becomes simpler, quicker, and more
efficient. These benefits transfer to disaster recovery testing as well, which supports compliance
efforts and eases the administrative burden.
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18. • Accelerate time-to-decision: The scale of HP 3PAR Utility Storage allows users to centrally
maintain data, thus avoiding the delays and complexity associated with aggregating data from
dispersed locations. For example, HP 3PAR Virtual Copy Software can be used to enable real-time
data analysis. Users can make an instant copy of production data available to a data warehouse
application for extraction and analysis, all with minimal performance impact to production
resources. By allowing administrators to co-locate production and decision support datasets, Virtual
Copy enables IT departments to create instant snapshots of production datasets for use in extract,
transform, and load (ETL) operations, thereby accelerating data warehouse creation. Afterwards,
snapshots of the data warehouse can become multiple sources for parallel datamart creation,
speeding data mining and reporting application delivery.
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