Type 1 Storage - HP 3PAR InServ

The HP 3PAR InServ storage system provides the University with its Type 1 "perfo
rmance" storage. This system is a revolutionary form of SAN storage with a numbe
r of innovative features found only on high-end enterprise arrays.
Thin provisioning
Most servers clients use a low proportion of the total storage they are allocate
d. Thin provisioning allows the array to allocate storage only when it is used.
This means that the storage can be "over-allocated", making the array seem much
bigger than it is. A space saving in excess of 50% is quite common. The rest of
the storage does not need to be installed until it is going to be used; on some
systems the space is never completely used, and the extra storage never needs to
be purchased at all.
Because of this, thin provisioning gives organizations the ability to support th
eir storage needs with much fewer disk drives. This in turn can cut energy consu
mption and the production of greenhouse gasses while saving on capacity and ener
gy costs.
HP 3PAR F-Class, T-Class and V-Class arrays
HP 3PAR F-Class, T-Class and V-Class arrays
Migration fat to thin
Using thin provisioning, existing volumes can be migrated onto the storage array
, automatically reclaiming the empty space that has not yet been used. Also, whe
n existing data is erased correctly, space can be reclaimed and will be reused i
n preference to requesting additional storage space.
Storage allocated from all disks evenly
This gives very fast response, as data is less frequently requested from the sam
e disk at the same time. No disk is overworked in comparison to another, so no m
aintenance hot spots .
Excellent random I/O performance
Due to the way storage comes from all across the array, there is much less waiti
ng for a piece of data to be available and so the access times for random disk I
/O are much better than for traditional storage arrays. This is particularly goo
d for virtualised server infrastructures such as VMWare.
Tiered storage
Different storage technologies and disk layouts provide varying levels of perfor
mance. The 3PAR arrays can move storage volumes between these configurations wit
hout significantly affecting the storage clients.
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Bottlenecks and single-points-of-failure seem to be the two things I combat most
as a systems administrator. As a systems admin, you try and identify these poi
nts and plan for redundancy and capacity. We have to serve as the realists and
the doom-and-gloom guys because we plan for the worst case. When applying that co
ncept to storage, it meant that we must purchase an array for our peak performan
ce periods and we would need to often purchase more arrays to combat the problem
of at most two controllers in an modular array.
But, newer arrays have come to market with much different architectures which di

rectly combat the bottleneck problems we have traditionally observed in modular

arrays. We have seen industry standard servers employed at storage controllers
over a cluster of systems to create arrays (like HP s Lefthand or VMware VSA solut
ions) and we have seen scale up architecures like the 3PAR StoreServ arrays whic
h have an active-active mesh of up to 8 controllers to increase the performance.
3PAR Active Mesh ArchitectureThe active mesh architecture is the first big diffe
rence between our EVA s and a 3PAR StoreServ. In an EVA, only a single controller
may truly access and control a LUN at any given time. Any requests received th
rough the other controller are simply proxied over and handled by the controllin
g controller. In the 3PAR, all controller nodes access and own the LUN and can
service requests to it. All of this activity is sent across a passive, full-mes
h backplane which connects the controller nodes to each other and to the storage
shelves. The nodes are connected across high-speed links (800 Mbps in each dir
ection), but also have a low-speed RS-232 serial link for redundancy for control
information between nodes in case the main links fail.
The second difference in architecture is related to scale and modularity. When
you purchase an EVA, you get two controllers and that s all it ll ever have. With a
3PAR array, you can start with two controllers and scale up to a total of 8 con
troller nodes as your needs increase, depending on the line. The 3PAR StoreServ
7200 is limited to 2 controllers and the 7400 can scale from 2 to 4 controllers
, while the 10000 series continues to scale to 8 controller nodes. This is a pa
rticular advantage when looking at cloud architecture which has increased the ov
erall utilization of controllers and taxed them to the point of bottleneck on my
arrays. HP has touted the P10000 3PAR method of modular controllers as the ans
wer to cloud scale issues. While administrators must still size arrays to the p
eak, there is some ability to purchase what is needed and then scale up the cont
rollers for the future, where its not possible today in the EVA line.
3PAR StoreServ can also address several storage tiers with different types of st
orage, mixing and matching volumes across types of storage as needed. While it
was also possible to create multiple disk groups in EVA one with traditional Fib
er Channel drives and one with solid state drives, for instance
the EVA does not
allow for mixing and matching data across multiple disk groups. With the 3PAR,
however, autonomic storage tiering is a software feature of the array that allo
ws chucklets of data to be spread across types of disk. The array can auto-magi
cally determine where things should optimally be stored based on how often and h
ow quickly they need to be access and move them from SATA to SAS to solid-state
disks accordingly. This all occurs without an administrator having to actively
manage it.
Thin provisioning is the probably the biggest difference between the arrays
not
from a pure capability comparison but from how its employed in the array. Since
the 3PAR aquisition, HP has brought thin to the EVA line, so from a check box p
erspective, they both have it.
HP 3PAR ASICBut 3PAR utilizes thin throughout its architecture. Thin is fully b
aked in the the 3PAR ASIC (or application specific integrated circuit) and so it
is available at the lowest levels of the array. The array allows for fat to th
in conversions of data non-disruptively through its proprietary algorithm. Repl
ication is also handled using the thin-built-in technology through zero detectio
n. Zero Detect, as the HP folks brand it, is a technology which detects and str
ips zeros from streams of data which makes it possible to no only encode data in
a thin fashion on write, but also take data at rest and convert it to thin prov
isioned data in a timely manner.
Since the HP acquisition of 3PAR, they have worked to make data more portable be
tween storage platforms. Peer Motion was introduced during VMworld 2011 and it
is federation technology and allows for zero-downtime relocation of storage from

one array to another. Peer Motion is more in line with Storage VMotion in vSph
ere than a replication technology. The majority of the work is handled on the d
estination system which is receiving the storage volume. HP has introduced Onli
ne Migration, a one way migration from EVA to 3PAR StoreServ. For EVA shops, th
is is an important technology
since it will allow for non-disruptive moves of da
ta from your EVA to a 3PAR array. The migration is configured through CommandVi
ew and at a basic level, involves the 3PAR fronting the EVA s LUNs to the host and
then transparently migrating the data behind the scenes until its all moved to
the 3PAR and then removes the link to the EVA. Peer Motion is a major enabling
technology for companies looking to migrate data in an automated way.
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Last month, I had the opportunity to discuss HP s cost savings announcements arou
nd the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 all-flash arrays.
I talked with Priyadarshi Prasad (@Priyadarshi_Pd), product line manager for HP
3PAR storage, about how 3PAR is trying to drive down costs of flash storage in a
rrays. Its not a single solution that is driving down the cost of solid state w
ithin 3PAR arrays according to Prasad. Its a progression of technology improvem
ents that brings the cost of solid state down to $2 per GB and near the cost of
spinning disk. And most importantly for customers, each of these capabilities i
s delivered while never compromising performance. HP 3PAR s design philosophy has
always been to offload as much of the operation to the drive or ASIC level to a
void taxing the CPU, since the CPU will at some point become a bottleneck.
Back in June of 2013, HP announced the 3PAR StoreServ 7450 all-flash array at HP
Discover in Las Vegas. At that time, the solution was based around the industr
y standard eMLC solid state drives at a cost of around $13 per GB. In December
2013, HP announced its adoption of the industry standard cMLC drives and took co
ntrol of solid state sparing. This allowed HP to drive down the costs of solid
state by 50% on a cost per GB.
According to Prasad, the cMLC drives was a 30%
reduction in cost and the Adaptive Sparing technology brought a 20% savings.
The Adaptive Sparing technology is HP taking control of the spare cells within e
ach solid state disk. Because of how solid state works, each cell of the SSD ha
s a finite number of writes before it degrades and is no longer reliable. To co
mbat this, SSD vendors build in roughly an additional 30% of spare space used wh
en primary cells fail. For a 400GB SSD, there may be approximately 112GB of add
itional capacity locked on the drive. That additional capacity is used after ce
lls are worn past usability in the primary 400GB area.
The 3PAR OS already included sparing technology across the entire array when it
was written for spinning disk. When solid state was added, it effectively doubl
e spared that storage with both the individual drive and the array handling spar
ing. HP worked with solid state vendors to open up reserved space on the solid
state disk and free up an additional 20% of space that was formerly reserved. I
t instead allocates spares chunklets across this space within the entire pool.
When the solid state drive has worn and experiences a drive failure, the array u
ses the spare chunklets across the other drives in the pool to rebuild and when
the drive is replaced and rebuilt it unmaps the space. HP achieves this Adaptiv
e Sparing using custom firmware on standard SSD drives.
That brings us to last month June 2014
one year since the 3PAR StoreServ 7450 ar
ray was introduced and HP had several more enhancements to announce. The primar
y announcement was something HP calls Thin Deduplication. Thin Deduplication us
es the zero-detect engine with a hashing capability that was built into the 3PAR
fourth generation ASIC. The other major announcement and addition is Express I
ndexing which allows indexing for up to 460TB of raw capacity. The Express Inde

xing allows for hash comparison and matching of data. Combining these two capab
ilities, HP estimates that customers will see a usable capacity of $2 per GB in
production use on solid state drives. That estimation includes RAID and metadat
a in its calculation along with all the savings from the array features.
dedupe
When the fourth generation ASIC was designed, hashing was included and with thin
deduplication each incoming chunklet is hashed on a 16K block size. Each block
is then looked up in the index, but HP doesn t simply rely on an index match, it g
oes and looks up the data to compare it to the incoming data. The incoming and
read data are then run through an XOR operation bit by bit and if they match, th
e result of the XOR operation is all zeros. Run that through the zero-detect en
gine and if it is zero, the index pointer is updated and if not, the new data is
written. The deduplication technology is driven by the zero-detect technology
that has been a part of 3PAR since the beginning.
As an aside, I ve been in the room with storage experts who have repeated asked HP s
David Scott and other HP technical staff if the ASIC is really needed and when
we might see a 3PAR virtual appliance. As each new generation of 3PAR is design
ed, HP s storage managers also asks the team if it is cheaper or faster to design
the array around industry standard hardware and handle the advanced capabilities
in software without the ASIC. Up to the fourth generation the answer has always
been that the ASIC adds considerable value and speed to the array and its opera
tion. This is a perfect example of the value of the ASIC. On the flip side, ha
d ASIC-based hashing not been included with the fourth-gen ASIC, this capability
would have inevitably been delayed until a fifth-generation ASIC or software ca
pability was created.
That s not to say HP is claiming some amazing foresight that led to these incredib
le outcomes. In some cases, HP s engineers have been lucky. For instance, the 16
K block size which is standard in 3PAR was decided long before deduplication was
on the horizon. Most other deduplicating arrays, including the HP StoreOnce ba
ckup arrays, use a 4K block size. A 4K block size would increase the overall pr
ocessing required, but would yield better deduplication rates. When tested on 3
PAR, changing the block size from 16K to 4K only yielded about 5% improvement in
deduplication but had a performance penalty. So, 16K seemed to be a sweet spot
for both performance and deduplication rates and that was already HP s default.
While HP is talking about $2 per GB on an all-flash array and while its talking
about Adaptive Sparing, Thin Deduplication and Express Indexing for the 3PAR Sto
reServ 7450 arrays, this is all something existing customers will benefit from.
I previously explored the power of common architectures on the blog. All exist
ing 3PAR customers with a fourth-generation ASIC will inherit and benefit from t
hese capabilities to some degree if they are using solid state anywhere in their
3PAR arrays. Fourth-gen ASIC arrays are the 7000 and 10000 series 3PAR arrays.
The new 1.92TB SSD drives will be available for all 3PAR customers in September
time frame with a list price of $14,000 per drive. That is roughly a native $7
per GB cost. All other savings are driven by the advanced features of the 3PAR
arrays.
Thin Deduplication will be delivered in the September timeframe also with a new
firmware release that will enable the capability on any SSD tier for 3PAR StoreS
erv 7000 and 10000 series arrays. Deduplication can be supported cross all level
s of disk since its algorithm based, but its yet to be seen if HP will allow it
on spinning disk. The deduplication is implemented at a CPG (common provisionin
g group) level.
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HP is showing off a the new StoreServ Management Console (SSMC) this week at HP
Discover EMEA. The new management console is a complete rewrite of 3PAR managem
ent that adopts many of the UI concepts that HP OneView introduced. It is HTML5
interface that is extremely responsive, but is a markedly different view for 3P
AR administrators. SSMC can connect to and manage up to 16 3PAR StoreServ array
s running at least 3.1.3 firmware, although the 3.2.1 firmware will provide the
best experience.
First up, the SSMC has a high level dashboard view that intends to highlight pro
blems and overall performance for an administrator in a quick, clean, graphical
view, shown in the screenshot below.
StoreServ Management Console
Beyond the dashboard, all the normal administrative tasks are logically grouped
by 3PAR Systems, Hosts, Virtual Volumes, and Virtual Volume Sets. Existing obje
cts display in a brief view that can be expanded to include additional informati
on in list view. Select any one of the objects and you get management and full
reporting for the object. All actions are organized under an Action button, mat
ching OneView s UI to allow for a cohesive management between products.
Even better than having to manually find what you re looking for, the new 3PAR SSM
C includes native search capabilities. When you begin a search, it defaults to
searching in the area you re currently managing in the console (like search defaul
ts to Virtual Volumes if you re in the Virtual Volumes area) but allows you to tog
gle to an Everywhere search to find any object in the SSMC managed systems that
matches your search term. This allows you to quickly locate virtual volumes or
a host no matter which 3PAR array it may be provisioned from.
Relationships between storage objects are important and the SSMC has a great map
s view that highlight relationships between defined hosts and 3PAR systems and t
he virtual volumes and exports assigned to hosts. The map views are powerful to
quickly traverse objects in the 3PAR universe with the help of search. If you
find yourself on an export or snapshot, maps lets you quickly open management fo
r the associated object you actually wanted in the map views.
SSMC gives System Reporter a major makeover, too. SSMC relies heavily on the da
ta stored in the 3PAR controllers and not an external database, in a change over
the previous System Reporter software. The existing reports are easily accessi
ble from a Create Report button and the data of the reports is rendered quickly
with the ability to highlight and drill into specific time frames and data point
s. The UI of SSMC provides a big leap in usability for reports on your 3PAR arr
ays.
SSMC will be freely available in a few weeks to customers, according to HP emplo
yees on the show floor. SSMC is installable on Windows or Linux and a virtual a
ppliance seems to be a logical expectation, too. SSMC may be used in simultane
ously with the 3PAR Command Line Interface and the 3PAR InServ Management Consol
e (IMC).
Unfortunately, the initial release of SSMC does not allow management of Peer Per
sistence configuration for 3PAR but will be included in a future release.
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One of the most daunting thing about moving from EVA to 3PAR is the change in te
rminology. While the concepts of many things are the same between the two archi

tectures, what they re actually called is a completely different matter. So the b

est place to start is with the brain.
Controller versus Node
3PAR Active Mesh Architecture
EVA have two controllers, regardless of which model. Each controller has its ow
n connectivity, however only one controller at a time can be in charge of any in
dividual Vdisk.
With the 3PAR, a StorServ 7400 or 10000 series can scale up from an initial 2 no
des to 4 or 8 respectively. Each node installs in pairs. Each node is equipped
with dual Intel Xeon Processors. And each one of the nodes has full control ov
er the storage which sits behind it, increasing throughput and scalability far b
eyond what EVA can handle. The nodes are configured in an Active Mesh architect
ure where each node is cross connected with each other in a fully redundant way.
Disk Groups versus CPG s
Disk Groups are a physical grouping of disks used for creating Vdisks. Common P
rovisioning Groups (CPGs) are a bit more than just a group of physical disks. C
PGs are a group of properties of how virtual volumes (VV) are created and where
the EVA disk groups are a physical divider, CPGs can share all or a part of the
same physical disks.
CPGs include properties like the RAID type, the device RPM, the device type and
domain. All these properties go towards defining a class of storage for a parti
cular use. The CPGs are reusable profiles that can be chosen when carving out V
V s.
Presentation versus Exporting
EVA has Vdisks and 3PAR has Virtual Volumes. Its basically the same, its a sect
ion of storage carved out of a EVA disk group or 3PAR common provisioning group
(CPG), respectively. On the EVA, you present your Vdisk to hosts. On the 3PAR,
its a slightly difference process. You take Virtual Volumes (VV) and you expor
t them to hosts. Each export becomes a VLUN, which is a single path from host t
o virtual volume. Its a small but important difference, in that it gives you an
additional level of control needed due to the possibility of many ports to pres
ent from. The 3PAR is slightly more intelligent
it senses which paths are zoned
or exposed to the host and where it is visible. With the EVA, you use all avai
lable paths, but with a 3PAR and the possibility of up to 72 PCI slots in a full
y populated StorServ 10800, presenting from all simply doesn t make sense. In add
ition, a single 3PAR can be used for both Fiber Channel, Fiber Channel over Ethe
rnet or iSCSI all from the same box. But, the process is roughly the same you m
atch a Vdisk or VV to a host and you export.
EVAPerf versus System Reporter
In all honesty, comparing System Reporter to EVAPerf does it a great disservice.
EVAPerf, while adequate, never quite gave administrators enough information an
d certainly never equipped them with tools to do historical analysis of performa
nce. System Reporter for 3PAR is a much more capable set of performance analysi
s software. While you can see real-time performance through the Management Cons
ole, System Report collects data into a separate database and allows administrat
ors to configure and create reports, even scheduling them to run automatically a
nd email. System Reporter is a lightweight web application that runs separately
from the 3PAR arrays and storage processors. It sits to the side and quietly c
ollects metrics for consumption after the fact. System Reporter offers views in

to the performance of physical disks, virtual volumes, host ports and remote cop
y ports among other things. Administrators looking for real-time analysis shoul
d look to the Management Console.
Chunklets
I just have to mention chunklets. First, the name just makes me laugh a little
when I hear it. It sounds like something that happens after a night of too much
partying. But chunklets are really the basis of data within the 3PAR arrays.
All data is ultimately split into chunklets and spread across the disks of the a
rray. While the EVA did a similiar thing by spreading bits of the data across d
isks in the disk group, chunklets are not bound to a grouping and can move acros
s any of the disks in the array as long as the CPG they belong to allows it. (C
PGs can limit operations to a specific group of disks, if you wanted or needed).
Chunklets are also the basis at which analysis and autonomic optimization occu
rs. When Autonomic Optimization is licensed and enabled on an array, each chunk
let is analyzed in order to know whether it should be promoted or demoted to a d
ifferent class of drives in the array
SSD, SAS or near line.