HP XP P9500 Storage - Manual (Page 20)

With Thin Provisioning Without Thin Provisioning Advantages
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 twelve 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. Instead, 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. Up to 1024 LDEVs may be
assigned to a single pool, providing a considerable amount of I/O capability to just a few THP
volumes.
Thin Provisioning work flow
The following illustrates the Thin Provisioning workflow.
Smart Tiers
After using Thin Provisioning software to virtualize LUs and pool storage into a thin provisioning
strategy, the array now has all the elements in place to offer automatic self-optimizing storage tiers
provided by Smart Tiers. Using Smart Tiers, you can configure a storage system with multiple
storage tiers using different kinds of data drives, including SSD, SAS, SATA, and external volumes.
This can improve the speed and cost of performance. Smart Tiers extends and improves the
functionality and value of Thin Provisioning. Both use pools of physical storage to define V-VOLs.
Each thin provisioning pool can be configured to operate either as a THP pool or a Smart Tiers
pool.
Automated tiering of physical storage is the next step for thin provisioned enterprise arrays.
Automated tiering is the ability of the array to dynamically monitor and relocate data on the
optimum tier of storage based on performance requirements. It focuses on data segments rather
than entire volumes. The functionality is entirely within the array without any mandated host level
involvement. Smart Tiers adds another layer to the thin provisioned environment.
Using Smart Tiers you can:
•
Configure physical storage into tiers consisting of multiple kinds of data drives, including SSD,
SAS, and SATA. Although host volumes are conventionally configured from a common pool,
the pool is efficiently configured using multiple kinds of data disk drives. Placing data that
needs high performance while reducing storage costs by using high cost disks such as SSDs
20 Introduction to provisioning