Friday, May 1, 2009

The 3PAR F-Series brings the power to replace multiple storage systems under a single system and to simplify the day to day storage management operations. 3PAR built its business leveraging thin provisioning and storage virtualization capabilities to simplify storage administration. As we discuss in our Thin Provisioning Basics article, thin has become a requirement for enterprise storage systems.

The F-Series will come in two models initially, the F200 and F400; the 200 being a dual controller system, the F400 being a dual or quad controller system. One of the things that makes the F-Series different from the competition is what 3PAR is calling it’s Mesh Active controller architecture. Essentially what this means it that all four controllers are active on each volume simultaneously. This compares favorably to other systems that while the purport to be active-active really assign the luns on a round robin basis, to a single controller, meaning that the controllers are actually active-passive with respect to the lun. The net is higher, more predictable performance.

Beyond the controllers the systems can handle either 12 F200 or 24 F400 fibre channel host ports, 8 to 16 ISCSi ports, 8 to 16GB's of cache, a max spindle count of 192 or 384 drives and a max performance of 46,800 or 93,600 IOPS from disk. (Larger numbers are for the F400 configuration.)

The systems share 3PAR's Gen3 ASIC with thin built in, which off-loads both RAID processing and fat-to-thin provisioning management from the storage controllers. This is critical since it allows all of the 3PAR family to maintain 100% of its performance profile even at max spindle count. Most systems start to see a performance bell curve at about 20% of drive capacity. The ability to maintain performance, predictively in a single box, further enhances the consolidation capabilities of the system.

The result is a system that can potentially allow a customer to drive down CAPEX by reducing the number of systems needed to deploy in the environment, leveraging thin provisioning to purchase and power less overall capacity while at the same time driving OPEX by simplifying and automating storage operations with storage virtualization.

With the release of the F-Series, midrange storage just got interesting.

The midrange market is a bit of a tweener, needing more than what the lower end solutions can offer but not quite as much as the high end systems require (especially from a cash perspective). The result is these midrange customers often buy multiple NetApp FAS, EMC Clariion or Hitachi AMS systems to meet their requirements. This adds to the complexity of the environment and lowers both storage and administrator efficiencies.