Recently HP announced the HP Get Virtual Guarantee Program
enabling clients to improve server virtualization by doubling physical
server VM density when deploying HP 3PAR Storage in VMware environments.
By purchasing HP 3PAR Storage
with the HP 3PAR Optimization Suite, you will see increased storage performance
levels that allow you to run a minimum of two times the virtual machine
workload on your physical servers. Whether this allows you to double your VM
density to stretch existing hardware resources further, halve your server
footprint, or lower the cost of a data center refresh, you will join the ranks
of the many leading global enterprise, government, and service provider
customers that have boosted server virtualization ROI with HP 3PAR Storage.
If
migrating from your traditional, legacy storage array to HP 3PAR Storage
doesn’t help you achieve at least double the virtual machine density that your
physical servers are able to support, we will make up the difference with free
disk capacity and the related software and services required to support this
additional capacity. From here
Let’s see what hardware and software technologies are used to provide
such effective storage space optimization.
The HP 3PAR Gen3 (or Gen4 in HP 3PAR P10000) ASIC with built-in
zero-detection capability prevents the bulk zero writes from ever being written
to disk, so no actual space is allocated.
There are three main features providing thin storage:
Start Thin – With HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning you can create the
Thin Provisioned Virtual Volumes (TPVVs) which are capable of responding to
host write requests by allocating space on demand in small increments.
Get Thin – With Thin Conversion the Virtual Volumes
with large amounts of allocated but unused space are converted to TPVVs that
are much smaller than the original volume
.
Stay Thin - Thin Persistence keeps TPVVs small by
detecting pages of zeros during data transfers and not allocating space for the
zeros. This feature works in real time and analyzes the data before it is
written to the source TPVV. With the 3PAR Plug-In for VAAI and the 3PAR Gen3
(or 4) ASIC these zeros write operations don’t make impact on the server,
storage, and network resources.
The Start Thin and Stay Thin need almost no additional
actions performed by storage administrators.
To use the Get Thin the disk
space zeroing is required. The disk space zeroing can be performed using
Microsoft sdelete or Qlogic space reclamation
utility sru.
Except the tight VMware
integration HP 3PAR also supports the Oracle 10g/11g database storage
reclamation solution and Thin Reclamation API developed in conjunction with
Symantec which allows host file systems to reclaim space associated with file deletions.
