HP XP P9500 Storage - Manual (Page 20)

With Thin Provisioning Without Thin Provisioning Advantages
Some file systems take up little pool space. For
more details, see
“Operating system and file
system capacity” (page 67) .
When physical capacity becomes insufficient,
you can add pool capacity without service
interruption. You must stop the disk array to reconfigure it. Reduces
management costs
In addition, with Smart Tiers you can configure
pool storage consisting of multiple types of data
drives, including SSD, SAS, SATA, and external
volumes. This eliminates unnecessary costs.
P9500 product licenses are based on used
capacity. As the expected physical disk capacity is
purchased, the unused capacity of the storage Reduces
management labor
You do not need to use LUSE because you can
allocate volumes of up to 60 TB regardless of
physical disk capacity.
system also needs to be managed on the
storage system and on licensed P9500
products. and increases
availability of
storage volumes for
replication
Smart Tiers allows you to use storage efficiently
by automatically migrating data to the most
suitable data drive.
Effectively combines many applications’ I/O
patterns and evenly spreads the I/O activity Because physical disk capacity is initially
purchased and installed to meet expected Increases the
efficiency of the data
drive
across available physical resources, preventing future needs, part of the data drive may not
parity group performance bottlenecks. be used. Stress of concentrating I/O loads on
Configuring the volumes from multiple parity just a subset of the storage may decrease
performance.
groups improves parity group performance. This
also increases storage use while reducing power
and pooling requirements (total cost of
ownership).
Thin Provisioning advantage example
To illustrate the merits of a Thin Provisioning environment, assume you have 12 LDEVs from 12
RAID 1 (2D+2D) array groups assigned to a THP pool. All 48 disks contribute their IOPS and
throughput power to all THP volumes assigned to that pool. If more random read IOPS horsepower
is desired for a pool, then it can be created with 32 LDEVs from 32 RAID 5 (3D+1P) array groups,
thus providing 128 disks of IOPS power to that pool. Because up to 1024 LDEVs may be assigned
to a single pool, this represents a considerable amount of I/O power under (possibly) just a few
THP volumes.
This type of aggregation of disks was possible previously only by using expensive and somewhat
complex host-based volume managers on the servers. Another alternative was to use the LUSE
option to configure greater capacity.
Thin Provisioning example
The following figure illustrates the difference between storage purchases made before and after
installing Thin Provisioning software.
20 Introduction to provisioning