Steve Taylor, one of our SEs, created an animation that shows the multiple layers of virtualization that create the natively wide-striped data layout on a 3PAR storage server. I think it's the coolest thing I'd seen since joining the company that quickly summarizes the multiple layers of virtualization in a 3PAR array.
All the functions shown are automatically done for the customer with minimal administrative effort. 3PAR customers do not spend time planning the layout of special disk pools or preparing their disk drives configurations for certain functions. All they do is select the drive class and the RAID level for the volume they are creating and the rest of the data layout work is done for them.
The demo shows how a RAID 5 3+1 virtual volume is created, what it does not show is the way other volumes would be created using different RAID levels over the same set of resources. It would be a replay of this, but with a different RAID level applied - everything else would be the same.
Not only does this design provide massive throughput, it also responds very quickly when customers need to add volumes. It's like driving a freight train that can corner. Try doing that with your v-Max on anything but a test track.
Animation is broke...
Posted by: Robert Weilheim | June 30, 2010 at 06:30 PM
Must be on your end. Its flash, streaming from YouTube. If you have a slow connection it will pause periodically.
Posted by: marc farley | July 01, 2010 at 08:49 AM
Can you tell me the major differences between your 3PAR architecture and IBM XIV? In some way you are the same. I do not understand the reason behind your RAID. If you cut all data into chucklets why you border assembling them into RAID? IBM XIV do not do this part and can still provide lots of IO right if SATA.
Posted by: Visiotech | July 02, 2010 at 06:20 PM
RAID is necessary for disk redundancy - which we manage at the sub-disk level with chunklets. 3PAR allows many different RAID levels concurrently to fit many different application requirements. XIV has only RAID 10, so its I/O specs are good (for SATA) but not great and also space utilization is sub-optimal. XIV only has SATA disks, which have far less IOPS than FC disks. It attempts to be a one-size fits all design, which doesn't really cut it for real-world scenarios.
3PAR Inserv arrays are multi-disk, multi-RAID so customers can create storage environments that fit a full range of requirements.
Posted by: marc farley | July 06, 2010 at 01:54 PM
Thanks Marc. I will read more about your architecture. I know your architecture sound more appropriate for various workload. That is typically SAN are for anyway. No SAN, even NAS today, are used for one type of IO stream at the time. With hundreds of severs hammering the disks nothing is sequential anymore. It never been in my book since mainframe time too. Everything is highly random on disk ever.
Only single user access "might" think it is sequential...in fact it is not.
Posted by: Visiotech | July 06, 2010 at 07:38 PM