Nearline for Online, a New Approach From 3PAR

3PAR introduced "Nearline for Online," an
innovative approach to cost-optimized storage. 3PAR Nearline for Online
is designed to enable customers to deploy traditional Nearline
drives–high-capacity, low-cost enterprise-class SATA–for all their
applications, including demanding online applications that typically
require premium Fibre Channel capacity. With Nearline for Online, 3PAR
Utility Storage customers have the ability to meet service level
requirements of both online and nearline applications with a single,
consolidated, massively scalable system using only Nearline disk drive
technology.

"3PAR provides us with a simple
and efficient tiered-storage platform upon which we can grow our
business," said Tony Tarone, Director of Service Operations for Cedar
Document Technologies. "The use of nearline capacity within the 3PAR
InServ Storage Server gives us maximum flexibility in fine tuning our
storage needs for cost optimization without sacrificing performance.
The decision to go all Nearline was not practical with competitive
solutions and has resulted in significant cost savings for Cedar."

In
traditional storage systems, premium Fibre Channel drives are typically
used for "online" applications while enterprise-class SATA drives are
generally used for less demanding "nearline" applications such as
archiving, backup, and lower-cost replication. With 3PAR’s Nearline for
Online, customers have the opportunity to reliably deploy only
cost-effective Nearline drives for both online and nearline
applications, resulting in greater cost optimization.

3PAR Nearline for Online is enabled by the following distinct technology advantages of 3PAR Utility Storage:

• Purpose-built virtualized storage platform:
  3PAR Utility Storage is designed to deliver high and predictable levels
  of performance through the wide striping of data across all
  enterprise-class SATA drives in an InServ Storage Server. The result is
  high performance for online applications from cost-effective Nearline
  drives.
• Support for Nearline drive technology in a tiered-storage array:
  3PAR’s support for Nearline drive technology provides both
  cost-effective capacity and greater levels of reliability than found
  with traditional SATA-based array technologies. 3PAR’s support of
  Nearline builds on a virtualized platform that supports a broad range
  of price/performance tiers, including 146-GB Fibre Channel Drives,
  400-GB Fibre Channel Drives, and 750-GB enterprise-class SATA drives.
  While customers continue to mix tiers in a single 3PAR InServ Storage
  Server, Nearline adoption has grown significantly.
• Rapid RAID Rebuild:
  The InServ Storage Server is designed to leverage its massively
  parallel and highly virtualized design to rapidly and intelligently
  rebuild RAID protection in the event of a drive failure. Focused on
  rebuilding only lost, used "chunklets" (not the entire capacity of a
  failed drive), 3PAR Rapid RAID Rebuild sources data from associated
  "raidlets" across a broad, distributed set of drives. Data is rebuilt
  into a global spare chunklet pool that is widely distributed across
  drives as opposed to being housed on a single drive. As a result,
  raidlets are returned quickly to a fully protected state while
  maintaining high production application performance.

"Data
requirements change constantly, and unfortunately administrators rarely
know until well after the fact that a change has occurred," said Steve
Duplessie, Senior Analyst and Founder at Enterprise Strategy Group.
"Storage has been pretty binary and manual, requiring administrators to
make ‘either or’ type decisions–either faster and more expensive or
slower and cheaper. 3PAR is creating more of a hybrid model that lets
the system figure out where to put things in order to optimize the
demand priorities balanced within the economic realities."

The
native tiered-storage capabilities of the InServ Storage Server already
give customers the ability to configure both Fibre Channel and Nearline
drive capacity within the same system–allowing them to consolidate
applications while accommodating multiple data service levels
(performance, availability, cost). For many environments, internal
tiering remains an optimal solution and an important component of
3PAR’s offering. 3PAR sales engineers are available to help customers
determine appropriate technologies and configurations for their
particular environments based on performance-to-capacity density
requirements. In addition, with 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, customers
can non-disruptively convert data service levels as needed across
Nearline and Fibre Channel storage tiers with a single command.

"Many
of our customers already enjoy tremendous cost benefits by
consolidating storage tiers with 3PAR Utility Storage," said David
Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. "With Nearline for Online, customers
now have an additional opportunity to achieve a resilient data storage
infrastructure at the lowest possible cost. It is through 3PAR’s highly
virtualized storage platform that we have made this possible."

3PAR