Data Backup Digest

What is HPs 3 PAR Storage?

Many businesses are opting to choose the latest HP storage for all their needs, but what is this talk of 3PAR, and why are more and more business users opting for it?

The 3PAR storage has been ground breaking in many ways. One of these is the high level of automation is boasts. Storage management can be expedited by handling storage provisioning, tiering and automatic change management at a sub-system level without intervention from the administrator.

Data can be moved non-disruptively between any HP 3Par without additional management layers or appliances allowing for smooth, unaffected services. The ability to move workloads between arrays is vital in the virtualised environments of today.

The 3PAR boasts a huge return on investment. Reportedly, you can double VM density on physical servers and through the automation spend up to 90 per cent less time managing storage. The 3PAR very much boasts a more for less deal – it really is that good. You can achieve higher service levels for more users and applications but with less infrastructure.

Of course, less infrastructure also makes large savings on power usage and cooling, with a smaller environment requiring less maintenance.

The tightly clustered, multi-tenant nature of the HP 3PAR allows you to start small and then expand as needed. New applications and workloads can be added affordably and non-disruptively – all within a single, “autonomically” tiered array.

The main area of difference is when you take a look at the traditional storage architecture vs HP 3PAR. Modular storage is typically cost-effective but scalability and resiliency are limited by dual-controller design. Traditional storage is known to be scalable and resilient but it is costly. The full-mesh interconnected nature of the 3PAR is pretty revolutionary, considering the hugely higher IOPs of the 3PAR. It therefore allows HP to make the claim that unlike traditional storage, the 3PAR meets today’s requirements for efficiency, multi-tenancy, and autonomic management.

In other words – in today’s environment businesses operate with data on the move all the time. Data is less static. VMs dynamically move between storage and required an interconnected array to allow them to do just that with no loss of service or noticeable slow down.

There are huge amounts of technology packed into the 3PAR that just take up too much explaining to fit in this article, but they include persistent cache to accommodate for unplanned component failures and data retention. The 3PAR ASIC gives the storage the power to remove allocated but unused space without impacting performance – curbing the reign of terror from greedy applications and dynamically making space available as and when it is really required.

HP have a reputation for that all-in-one reliable and top quality approach, and in this case they do not fail. While the 3PAR may be a large investment for a business, it is a world and above all the other offers on the market. If a business is looking for the best of the best the HP 3PAR is the undisputable king of storage.