back to article HP gives StoreServ a speed boost with flashy cachey spit'n'polish

HP is beautifying hybrid flash/disk StoreServ (3Par) arrays by adding deduplication, flash cacheing and faster writes. Deduplication, branded Thin Deduplication, was added to its all-flash 7450 StoreServ array in June. Now it's been extended to all hybrid flash/disk StoreServ 7000 and 10000 arrays, helping get rid of …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seriously...

    "Deduplication, branded Thin Deduplication, was added to its all-flash 7450 StoreServ array in June."

    It was _announced_ in June, but just released now.

    "Now it's been extended to all hybrid flash/disk StoreServ 7000 and 10000 arrays,"

    Only for SSD tiers, and since a 7450 really isn't much different from the other 3PARs, the software runs on all of them. It would have been more work to add the model restriction so they just let it go.

    So the summary actually is, "HP shipped a feature that they announced 6 months ago". Yawn.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Seriously...

      Also note that Thin Deduplication will not work with Adaptive Optimization (3PAR autotiering). If you have a 7000 (non-7450) or 10000 with SSDs, you're probably using them as an AO tier, assuming that you've gotten AO to work. You can either have deduplicated SSD volumes or tiered volumes. Pick.

      1. Man Mountain

        Re: Seriously...

        No, not either ... both! You can have some SSD capacity boosting an AO Policy, you can have some volumes pinned in SSD and deduped, and you can have some SSD capacity used as Flash Cache. That's pretty flexible, in my book!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who Takes DCIG Seriously?

    So the ancient 10800 "beat" the XP7 (OEM Hitachi G1000)? Oh, yeah, that's really believable. There's a new chicken bucket and six pack of lager at the DCIG offices/rusty trailer tonight.

    1. M. B.

      Re: Who Takes DCIG Seriously?

      That DCIG report is a load of garbage, any vendor who wanted to help them with the scoring was allowed to do so and any vendor who didn't was docked points. It is based entirely off of the marketing literature and websites, they did no lab up any of the products they "evaluated".

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Avoid at all costs

    We have a 7000 series 3PAR and I would strongly recommend that if you are thinking of buying one, you seriously reconsider. Awful devices and whilst 'they work' at providing disk space, they really aren't very good at doing much more. AO doesn't work right, dedupe doesn't either, and dont get me started with their raid levels using 'chunklets'. Oh and if you ever thought about reporting or checking what its doing - well, forget it.

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      WTF?

      Re: AC Re: Avoid at all costs

      The idea of complaining about chunklets implies to me that you haven't a clue as to what your are talking about. I would suggest the majority of your PEBKAS issues could be solved by your boss paying out for the right training:

      http://www.hp.com/education/courses/hk902s.html

      http://www.hp.com/education/courses/hk904s.html

    2. Nate Amsden

      Re: Avoid at all costs

      I just got my 7450 installed last week and upgraded to 3.2.1 MU1 (as far as I can tell that is the first release that supports dedupe and it is *brand* new (the ISO on HP's ftp site is dated Oct 30).

      http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.BINARYPORTLET/public/kb/docDisplay/resource.process/?spf_p.tpst=kbDocDisplay_ws_BI&spf_p.rid_kbDocDisplay=docDisplayResURL&javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&spf_p.rst_kbDocDisplay=wsrp-resourceState%3DdocId%253Demr_na-c04491766-1%257CdocLocale%253Den_US&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken

      from the PDF

      "After upgrading to HP 3PAR OS 3.2.1 MU1, customers with an SSD CPG can provision TDVVs(Thinly Deduped Virtual Volume)."

      the 3.2.1 release notes don't mention dedupe, only 3.2.1 MU1 (above link has release notes for both versions in one PDF)

      So find it kind of hard to believe you've had much time to test dedupe at this point. Dedupe would obviously get it's best value on something like VDI (never used VDI myself and don't foresee that changing anytime soon).

      As a customer since 2006 I have been very happy, even more so to have such a mature platform offering all flash and dedupe etc.. The initial footprint of our 7450 (4-node) can fit almost 200TB of raw flash alone (that is assuming they don't release larger drives in the future which I'm sure they will have larger drives). Cost was really good too. Even if there is no dedupe it will pay for itself quite easily in performance and scalability.

      I exchanged a couple emails with a friend of mine who works at Pure Storage (who used to work at 3PAR) and he said they do get beaten by 3PAR on price (not on data reduction - 3PAR doesn't support compression yet). Just hearing 3PAR beating someone (esp a smaller player) on price is just foreign to me. Most of it comes down to the very large SSDs and how they can get much lower $/GB as a result.

      I don't have anything yet connected to my 7450, been busy configuring new vmware servers and other things -- but in the next few days will be storage vmotioning 1-200 VMs over to it. I don't expect much savings from dedupe until we move some databases over. Short term it's just playing around with it, see how it runs, probably won't have time to move much production stuff on it until our holiday "freeze" starts at the end of next week.

      I have never used AO -- never really liked the concept of sub LUN tiering(on any platform was never sold on it), I always wanted to see a real array-based flash cache(that can cache writes), and it seems now after 5+ years of me pleading for it they are getting closer.. caching reads on a 90% write workload isn't going to do shit for me.

    3. Man Mountain

      Re: Avoid at all costs

      I'm not surprised dedupe isn't 'working right' as it's not out in the field really yet and you sound so inexperienced (if you are a real customer) that I'd be amazed if you were on an early release programme!

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Avoid at all costs

      Oh dear, how transparent a vendor Troll

      None of this works, HP just made all this stuff up, that''s why they're selling so much of it. Being extra special I managed to test the whole thing well before HP even released the code, honest. I know it sounds good but please plase don't buy it. Hopefully we'll (an-other-vendor) have something marginally exciting to distract you some time soon.

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