HP XP Racks - Manual (Page 18)

With Thin Provisioning Without Thin Provisioning Advantages
HP XP7 Storage product licenses are based on
used capacity rather than the total defined
capacity. As the expected physical disk capacity is
purchased, the unused capacity of the storage
system also needs to be managed on the Reduces
management labor
and increases
You can allocate volumes of up to 60 TB
regardless of physical disk capacity.
storage system and on licensed HP XP7
Storage products. 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 I/O patterns of many
applications and evenly spreads the I/O activity Because physical disk capacity is initially
purchased and installed to meet expected Increases the
performance
across available physical resources, preventing future needs, portions of the capacity may be efficiency of the data
drive
bottlenecks in parity group performance. unused. I/O loads may concentrate on just a
Configuring the volumes from multiple parity subset of the storage which might 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 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, 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.
18 Introduction to provisioning