Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
Executive White Paper
Data Integrity and Performance Come along for the Ride
as Larger, More Economical SSDs Find Their Way into
HPE 3PAR StoreServ Systems
By DCIG Lead Analyst Jerome Wendt
SSDs scaling to double digit terabyte capacities are coming soon to every all-flash array. As this occurs, high capacity SSDs
present new data integrity and performance challenges that all-flash arrays must be equipped to address. Using HPE 3PAR
StoreServ systems, organizations can know that these systems already have the features natively on board to take full
advantage of high capacity SSDs.
COMPANY
Hewlett-Packard Company
3000 Hanover Street
Palo Alto CA 94304-1185
650.857.1501
Founded 1939
www.hpe.com
INDUSTRY
Computer Systems
CHALLENGES
• Supporting higher capacity, more
economical SSDs
• Disk-based storage arrays not optimized
for reads or writes to flash
• Manufacturers of SSDs reserve up to
25 percent of flash capacity for
housekeeping tasks
• Higher incidents of undetected, silent data
corruption (SDC) on high capacity SSDs
SOLUTION
HP 3PAR StoreServ sytems
BENEFITS
• Adaptive Read and Adaptive Write features
optimize read and write I/Os for flash
• Adaptive Sparing feature reclaims reserve
capacity on SSDs and frees it for use by
the system
• Persistent Checksum feature detects and
corrects silent data corruptions as soon
as they occur
• Express Layout feature helps to ensure high
levels of performance on even the smallest
3PAR StoreServ systems
• May confidently deploy higher capacity SSDs
such as 7.68TB and 15.36TB SSDs as they
become available
Higher capacity, more economical solid state drives
(SSDs) are rapidly becoming available on all-flash
arrays. This may sound like great news to organizations wishing to either acquire all-flash arrays or
accelerate their implementation of an all-flash data
center. However, this next generation of SSDs creates
new challenges that all-flash arrays must be architected to address. HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems
take on the challenges that these SSDs present and,
in so doing, enable organizations to continue their
adoption of all-flash arrays and move more swiftly
toward implementing an all-flash data center.
Increased SSD Capacity Demands
Appropriate All-flash Array Architecture
There is little doubt that higher capacity, enterprise
grade SSDs are finding their way into all-flash arrays,
and perhaps more quickly than organizations anticipate. Higher capacities help to drive down the price
per GB of SSDs. As this occurs, organizations will
want to expand their use of SSDs to enable more of
their applications to take advantage of its performance
benefits. This trend dictates that organizations more
carefully examine the architecture of all-flash arrays to
ensure the array can manage and capitalize upon
these forthcoming increases in SSD capacities.
Enterprises differ from consumers in how they prioritize features on SSDs as they place a greater emphasis upon data integrity and performance versus
features such as cost and capacity.
Enterprise SSD Priorities
(in order)
Consumer SSD Priorities
(in order) 1
1.
Data integrity
Cost
2.
Performance
Capacity
3.
Capacity
Performance
4.
Cost
Data integrity
In order for an all-flash array to satisfy these enterprises priorities for data integrity and performance
while also successfully addressing the growing capacities and lower costs of SSDs, enterprises need to
select an all-flash array that enables them to capitalize
on increased SSD capacities and lower costs without
requiring them to sacrifice either data integrity or application performance.
“HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems have
the built-in features that enterprises
need to support the next generation of
bigger, more economical SSDs without
organizations having to worry about
sacrificing either data integrity or
application performance.”
— Jerome Wendt, DCIG Lead Analyst
HPE 3PAR StoreServ Adaptively Scales
without Compromise
To leverage this next generation of SSDs without
making any compromises, HPE 3PAR StoreServ
systems offer five distinctive technologies that equip
them to dynamically adapt to these changes in SSDs.
Adaptive Reads
Using its Adaptive Read technology, HP 3PAR StoreServ systems only read into cache the amount of data
required by the read request from the host. This is a
subtle but notable change from disk-based storage
arrays. Disk-based storage arrays pre-fetch larger
amounts of data from disk. They do this, in part, to
accelerate performance as they anticipate the application requesting more reads of like data from its disk.
However, this is done in large part because reading
from disk is so much slower than reading from cache.
Flash largely negates the need to pre-fetch data from
disk since flash does reads so much faster than disk.
By only storing the amount of data in cache that the
application requests, HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems
free up more space in their cache to service more
read requests more quickly from applications.
1. http://www.bswd.com/FMS13/FMS13-Sykes.pdf, pg. 8
June 2016
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
Adaptive Writes
HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems implement a different
approach to accelerate applications writes to SSDs.
The more writes that are made to SSDs, the more
quickly the flash components in them wear out. To
minimize the number of writes made to individual
SSDs, HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems examine all
write I/O’s for data and commit those segments that
use an entire 16KB blocks to flash.
As part of its examination of write I/Os, the 3PAR
StoreServ systems also identify those writes that hold
less than 16KB of data. They then only commit that
part of the write to flash rather than doing a write of
an entire 16KB block of data. This process results in
fewer writes to flash while increasing the endurance
of the flash in the SSDs.
Adaptive Sparing
Every SSD manufacturer typically reserves some
capacity on its SSDs to perform internal management
functions that maintain data integrity and the overall
performance of the SSD. But this feature functionality
comes with a price. SSD manufacturers reserve up to
25 percent of SSD capacity to complete these tasks.
HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems mitigate the need for
SSD manufacturers to reserve that capacity with its
Adaptive Sparing feature. In partnership with HPE,
SSD manufacturers release the reserve capacity on
their SSDs to HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems. 3PAR
StoreServ systems now, in essence, do the ongoing
internal SSD maintenance and management functions by reserving a certain amount of space on each
SSD as “spares.” This process serves to maintain
data integrity and increase performance even as
3PAR StoreServ arrays increase the available capacity on each SSD and extend the SSD’s life span to five
years or more.
Persistent Checksum
A growing threat to the integrity of corporate data
stored on SSDs is silent data corruption. The increasing density of these drives makes it more likely that bit
flips occur (a zero changes to a one or vice versa)
when data is either written to or read from flash media.
Here again, HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems already
have a mechanism in place to protect data integrity
regardless of how large individual SSDs get. 3PAR
StoreServ systems append a Data Integrity Field to
the end of each read or write. This eight-byte record
ensures that the data sent by the host is the same as
when it arrives at the 3PAR StoreServ system.
In the event that a 3PAR StoreServ system detects a
data error, it requests a re-transmit of the write I/O.
A 3PAR StoreServ system even takes this errorchecking process one step further. It uses its ASIC
to perform data integrity checks while data is
in-flight. These checks occur before data is written
to disk or received by the host to complete data
integrity checks more quickly.
Express Layout
Every HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems uses an “activeactive” controller configuration that optimizes SSD
performance as well as ensures that each controller
node can concurrently access SSDs using a 12GB
SAS connection. HPE 3PAR’s Express Layout feature
builds on this configuration for smaller deployments.
In this configuration, every node has active access to
every SSD, allowing the nodes to distribute data
across every SSD in the system to distribute available
SSD capacity resources more efficiently.
HPE 3PAR StoreServ Systems Ready for
Bigger, More Economical SSDS Today
Every organization now thinks about the possibility
of implementing all-flash arrays and, as SSDs
increase in capacity and decrease in cost, that
becomes more likely every day. However, as anxious
as organizations may be to go there, they have no
desire to compromise either the integrity of their
data or the performance of their applications to
arrive at that destination more quickly.
HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems put those fears to
rest. 3PAR StoreServ systems have already built in
the features to support current and next generation
of the larger, more economical SSDs such as the
7.68TB and 15.36TB SSDs that HPE released in
middle of 2016. As these larger SSDs become available, organizations can leverage them without
having to worry about compromising on either data
integrity or application performance. If anything, the
architecture and features of HPE 3PAR StoreServ
systems position them to start their journey of implementing all-flash arrays, and even an all-flash data
center, with a confidence and certainty that few
other all-flash array providers can offer.
Executive White Paper
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About HPE
HPE creates new possibilities for technology
to have a meaningful impact on people,
businesses, governments and society. The
world’s largest technology company, HPE
brings together a portfolio that spans printing,
personal computing, software, services and IT
infrastructure at the convergence of the cloud
and connectivity, creating seamless, secure,
context-aware experiences for a connected
world. More information about HPE (NYSE:
HPE) is available at http://www.hpe.com.
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4AA6-5999ENW, Created June, 2016