HP 3PAR Solid State Technology Boosts Application Performance

Organisations with massive cloud and virtualised environments are turning to SSDs to address application performance gaps and improve infrastructure efficiency. However, integrating SSDs in legacy IT environments can be challenging and costly, requiring administrators to move data manually between storage tiers to optimise service levels. This extremely time-intensive process increases data-center maintenance requirements, which can eliminate the performance and cost benefits that SSDs deliver.

The new all-SSD configuration for HP 3PAR P10000 Storage solves these administrative challenges using automatic storage-tiering capabilities with the included HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimisation Software. The solution distributes data to the right storage tier at the right time, reducing data-center management costs and maximising system performance.

“Before our move to HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimisation Software with solid state, service levels were being compromised and substantial time was spent moving between tiers reactively,” said Ken Kirchoff, director, Unix Systems and Storage, Priceline. “Now that data is automatically tiered using HP 3PAR Storage with Adaptive Optimisation Software, our total cost of ownership has dramatically improved, and our staff has more freedom to concentrate on strategic growth opportunities.”

The new all-SSD HP 3PAR P10000 Storage system delivers the same industry-leading⁽¹⁾ performance as the existing HP 3PAR P10000 using a fraction of the number of drives, further reducing client data-center footprint and energy costs. This all-SSD system supports up to 512 SSDs per array—an increase of four times. As a result, it lowers client cost per input/output operations per second by 70 percent, and reduces cost per kilowatt hour by more than 80 percent, making it ideal for performance-driven applications.⁽²⁾

Seamless server-to-storage SSD integration improves performance, reduces cost

Only HP Converged Infrastructure integrates SSDs seamlessly across servers and storage, allowing clients to improve application performance while reducing operational complexity and cost.

The new HP Smart Cache for the HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers will soon be available with advanced functionality that utilises SSDs for caching to accelerate workload performance. The solution will use HP Smart Analytics technology to intelligently assign frequently accessed “hot data” to high-performance SSD drives. By providing workload-aware intelligence to optimise system operations, this “smart caching” capability helps customers achieve six times higher performance for transactional workloads⁽³⁾ as well as 50 percent more performance for video-streaming applications, compared to previous generations.⁽⁴⁾

HP also is extending the functionality of HP Smart Cache within HP ProLiant Gen8 servers to a converged solution with HP 3PAR Storage solutions. This collaborative-caching capability will autonomically copy data in real time from the HP 3PAR Storage arrays to the HP Smart Array SSD cache on the HP ProLiant Gen8 server. This innovative capability enables clients to improve performance while reducing costs and latency, resulting in more agility when responding to service-level demands. 

“While SSDs deliver critical performance for cloud and virtualised workloads, legacy infrastructures fail to maximise the technology’s return on investment by requiring intensive data-tiering administration,” said Adam Day, Storage Sales Specialist, Storage South Africa, HP. “The ability to intelligently automate data mobility between HP ProLiant servers and HP 3PAR systems within array tiers fully actualises SSD performance and efficiency so clients can focus more time growing the business instead of managing the back office.”

Pricing and availability

HP 3PAR P10000 with all SSDs is available today for a starting price of R2.8M.⁽⁵⁾

HP’s premier Europe, Middle East and Africa client event, HP Discover, takes place Dec. 4-6 in Frankfurt, Germany.