In this economic climate, where business costs are under such close scrutiny, storage customers need to know how to get the largest return on their storage investments. Here are five ways 3PAR InServ storage arrays can help customers get through these tough times.
1. 3PAR customers typically buy only the disk capacity they need when they first install their InServ arrays and then add capacity later when it is needed. This "pay as you grow" approach to buying storage is what thin provisioning was designed for. Customers save money with their initial purchase and also when they later buy additional capacity due to the declining cost of storage capacity over time.
2. 3PAR customers run their InServ arrays at higher disk utilization levels, which means they get more productivity from their storage investment. Higher utilization is one of several benefits derived from 3PAR’s wide striping disk layout scheme that spreads data across a very large number of drives (hundreds of drives are common). This randomizes the workload, effectively applying all drive resources to all applications and removing drive performance bottlenecks – even at high utilization levels.
3. 3PAR customers use automated tools to provision and expand their InServ arrays, which means they can avoid spending money on professional services or spending lots of time planning and performing provisioning tasks. The ease with which InServ arrays are provisioned and expanded comes from the combination of wide striping, fine-grained volume management (RAID) and autonomic disk layout functionality.
4. 3PAR customers mix drive types, workloads and platforms in their InServ arrays. Mixing drive types reduces the cost per GB when lower cost nearline (7200 rpm) drives are used for primary storage. Mixing workloads and platforms means customers can achieve greater levels of storage and server consolidation, which reduces both capital and administrative costs.
5. 3PAR customers typically spend less on power, cooling and floor space for a given workload. This is due primarily to thin provisioning and higher utilization levels on InServ arrays, but it also comes from the use of nearline drives for primary storage, which combine greater densities with reduced power and cooling requirements.
Comments