This week in Frankfurt HP is hosting Discover 2012, where they've unveiled some big product announcements. The big news is the birth of the 3PAR P7200 and P7400 arrays, a new line of hardware which drastically pushes down the price point for 3PAR storage firmly into the mid-range. HP is clearly targeting customers that are looking at EMC VNX 5000s, NetApp FAS3200s, Dell Compellent, and other arrays at that price point.
You now have a single architecture, same set of tier-1 tools, from the mid-range to the high end. Bare bones configurations start at $20K for the 2-controller model. As always, HP's Calvin Zito and fellow vExpert, has written up a short article about the new 3PAR P7000 series, and has a couple of videos to boot. You can check out his post here. The full HP announcement page is here.
But for those of you unfamiliar with 3PAR, I've give you a quick overview. 3PAR was a silicon valley startup which specialized in tier-1 block storage with a unique way of wide striping LUNs across all disks in your array. The founders were SUN refugees. A couple of years ago HP bought them (in a bidding war with Dell) to augment their aging EVA line, and give them an in-house tier-1 array.
The secret 3PAR sauce are "chunklets" of data which are the building blocks of virtualizing the storage and use several layers of abstraction so you no longer manage RAID sets, spindles, or spare disks that sit idle. LUNs are chopped up and evenly distributed across your entire array, in an even manner, automatically balancing I/O across all controllers and disk ports. Another key feature of the secret sauce is their proprietary 3PAR ASIC (now at Gen4) which offloads RAID calculations, zero detection, and other work off the Intel processors.
The high end model (StorServ 10800) can scale up to 8 controllers, and all have a true active/active concurrent controller architecture, not asymmetric active/active like the vast majority of mid-range arrays. 3PAR competed with EMC Symmetrix and HDS USP, which both have active/active concurrent designs. This improves I/O throughput and automates load balancing between controllers. For a geeky overview of all the 3PAR "secrets" check out the 3PAR InForm OS concepts guide here.
At VMworld 2011 HP announced the 3PAR P10000 series, which included the V400 (four-controller) and V800 (eight-controllers). However, if you needed a tier-1 disk array for under $100K, then you were left looking elsewhere or stuffing your piggy bank with dough to spring for a V400 sometime in the future.
The two new models are the StoreServ 7200 (dual controllers), and the 7400 (quad controllers). The 7200 is a very compact 2U, and holds 24 2.5" drives, with expansion up to 144 disks with more shelves. The 7400 is pictured at the top of this article, and more than doubles the capacity up to 480 drives and 864TB raw storage. You can view the full Quickspecs PDF here. With an upcoming upgrade to the InForm OS, it will also support FCoE on the optional CNAs or iSCSI (today).
Being familiar with 3PAR, I wondered what they were going to do about the service processor in the P7000 series. Basically the service processor is a 1U appliance, which didn't sit in the data path or control the data flow, but was used for monitoring and remote servicing. Guess what? That is now virtualized, and is packaged to run on vSphere 4.1, 5.0 or 5.1. Hyper-V support is coming in 2013. That's pretty cool! You can still buy a hardware version of the SP, if you wish.
Reading through the 3PAR Software Products PDF, found here, I stumbled across some new features as well. "Persistent Ports" is a tier-1 data resiliency feature that allows non-disruptive software updates of the array, without requiring host multi-pathing software. Even if you have multi-pathing software, this enables faster/seamless fail-over since some multi-pathing software can take 10s of seconds to reconfigure. Basically controller node WWNs are shadowed on another node, through the use of NPIV, and can nearly instantly migrate so that the host doesn't realize a node went offline.
Another new feature, which probably won't be used by end users, is the addition of a REST-compliant Web Services API. Hopefully it will be used by VARs for better integration/management of 3PAR. Autonomic rebalance, which enables the array to non-disruptively re-distribute data across the array when new hardware is added, has been added. Also, for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V customers, the 3.1.2 release of InForm OS will support ODX offload, which is Microsoft's version of VMware VAAI with added goodies like space reclamation.
One good aspect of the HP acquisition of 3PAR, is the incorporation of easy setup tools that EVA customers may be used to using. HP also announced a migration path from EVA to 3PAR, that they say is even easier than migrating from one EVA to another EVA. Online data migration, and automatic thin-conversion! Unlike the big brother 10000 series, the P7000 models are self-install and have simple EVA-like initial setup. No professional services needed to get your P7000 up and running!
Ok, so what if you buy a P7200 today, and you have a storage explosion and need more space or even more host facing ports? 3PAR has "peer motion" which allows you to non-disruptively move LUNs to a new 3PAR array, such as a P10000. You would use the same management tools, and your servers wouldn't even know the migration took place. Pretty cool!
Finally, another new feature due out in 1H 2013 is Priority Optimization. As shown in the HP slide below, you can guarantee IOPS and bandwidth at the tenant and application level. In multi-tenant environments, or where storage is shared between environment such as production and test/dev, this could be a great feature.
In short, this is a great announcement and a big win for customers. EVA customers can finally get modern highly virtualized storage at a great price point, customers can non-disruptively migrate to the P10000s, and existing P10000 customers could use a P7x00 as a DR/BC target for cost effective storage.
As good as the 3PAR hardware is, HP could really invest a lot into an extreme make-over of their System Reporter (SR) and Recovery Manager for VMware products. EMC and other vendors have a leg up in this area, that would not take a great deal of money for HP to close up the gap. Thankfully the IMC, which you use to manage and provision storage on 3PAR, is extremely friendly to use and doesn't suffer from the same issues as the other two software products. For SMB customers I think getting brand-new SR and Recovery Manager releases will be key for smooth adoption and good user experience.
Great summary as always Derek. I would like to add 2 things.
ReplyDeleteThe 3PAR line offers Write Caching like many other arrays, but if you drop down to only 1 node, the write caching is disabled and the array is put in write-through mode to avoid data loss should the lone controller go down. In a 7200, this means any time you need to bounce a controller for online maintenance you will take a performance hit. This is very common in 2 node based arrays and not unique to 3Par. The 7400 would allow you to take 1 node offline and maintain write caching. So if you buy the 2 node version just expect to do your maintenance during off peak hours.
2nd point is the WS2012 Storage Head you mentioned will also be getting some tools from HP that allow you to actually carve out storage for the NAS side of the house from the WS2012 instance itself. So you don't have to go to the 3Par Inform GUI and make changes and then go back to Windows and Rescan. You make all the changes from the Windows side and its all done in a single console.
@DAN: Thanks for the feedback! Yes you are very correct about the 4 and 8 node (on the 10800) being able to maintain write cache when one controller is offline. This is a great advantage of the multi-node 3PAR architecture.
ReplyDeleteNice to hear HP has done some integration with the WS2012 storage gateway. Ultimately, for a seamless experience, either the IMC needs full NAS integration (e.g. another pane), or on the WS2012 Gateway it needs a fully integrated IMC/File Server GUI so you can do everything in one pane like the NAS competition. I saw a public HP document that seemed to hint of true unified block/NAS for 3PAR sometime in the future.
Personally, in Microsoft-centric environments for productivity workers, Microsoft has a lot of new security features in WS2012 that I doubt many, or any NAS, vendors will implement. So using Windows for those file shares I think makes a lot more sense than a dedicated NAS appliance. But there are certainly other uses where a true NAS appliance has advantages, such as huge scale-out for engineering or other atypical applications.
Hi Derek,
ReplyDeleteDo you know if this "service processor" is required to run a 3par array, and is it MS windows based? we were told to manage it,m once connects directly to the array. We're EVA customers looking at 3par to provide storage for our (non-windows) servers.
We are also noticing some possible sticker-shock in comparison to the eva line, for example for a ~400 sas drive array a greater than 2x price differential, but maybe the products quoted by the salespeople is not apples/apples. what do you think?
THANKS for your writeup and comments.
-Tom
@Tom: Yes the SP is required to properly manage a 3PAR array. It does NOT sit in the data path or perform data-critical operations, so it can go down/die/fall over dead, and everything will keep running just fine. It's actually a VM appliance, running some flavor of Linux, not Windows.
DeleteI would look at the EVA as the Honda Accord, and the 3PAR as an Acura RL. Accord will get the job done, not lots of bells and whistles, and lots of people have them. 3PAR is your luxury sedan with ultra high availability, better technology, and much more powerful. You get what you pay for. But HP can heavily discount their products, depending on the size of your company, relationship, prior purchases, and how well you can twist their arms. So I would not look at list price, something far below that. Remember that software licenses are nearly 100% margin, so try and get them to really discount the software.
Great summary if it is true.
ReplyDeleteActive/Active......Last thing I read from HP directly is the following from the HP 3PAR Architecture Guide
"An LD has an “owner” and a “backup owner”. The owner is the Controller Node that under normal circumstances performs all operations on the LD. If the owner fails, the backup owner takes over ownership of the LD. The owner sends sufficient log information to the backup owner so that the backup owner can take over without loss of data.
The chunklets used in an LD are preferably chosen from PDs for which the owner and backup owner are connected to the primary and secondary path (respectively) so that the current owner can directly access the chunklets."
FAR FROM ACTIVE ACTIVE ARCHITECTURE you described above. This is mid-range, sexy mid-range, but mid-range.
@Anonymous: You are confusing two very different aspects of the storage array and drawing an incorrect conslusion. One aspect is how the array writes to the physical disk, which is quite different from how it handles vLUNS which is what the host sees.
DeletePer 3PAR:
"Unlike legacy “active-active” controller architectures—where each LUN (or volume) is active on only a single controller—this Mesh-Active design allows each LUN to be active on every mesh controller in the system. This design delivers robust, load-balanced performance and greater headroom for cost-effective scalability, overcoming the tradeoffs typically associated with modular and monolithic storage. The high-speed, full-mesh, passive system backplane joins multiple Controller Nodes to form a cache-coherent, active-active cluster that represents the next generation of Tier 1 Storage."
The 3PAR is a true active/active concurrent design, not an asymmetrical LUN model like nearly all mid-range arrays. A vLUN is concurrently presented out all configured storage ports and all equally handle the I/O load with no added latency.
The 3PAR ASIC has an active high speed bus (mesh) between all controllers. This is in stark contrast to say the EVA or NetApp, where LUNs can have I/Os reaching it via optimized (active controller) or non-optimized (standby controller) controller ports.
So back to how the 3PAR handles the physical disks. Any controller can accept I/Os for any presented vLUNs and all paths are equally optimized and active. Once the I/O hits the controller the 3PAR ASIC will send the I/O to the controller which is the primary owner of the spindle. Since this is a high speed, high bandwidth, low latency path internal to the 3PAR, no negative effect to I/Os is seen.
The 3PAR has several layers of abstraction, and physical disks are NOT presented to hosts. CPGs, chunklets, and virtual volumes are all layers of indirection that allow the controllers to be truly active/active concurrent. This can also be verified by ESXi recognizing the array as AA (active/active) vs. ALUA.
You can find out all the details in this great HP document:
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/pdfs/4AA3-3516ENW.pdf