Thin Provisioning Z Advantage Example; Thin Provisioning Z Workflow; Smart Tiers; Smart Tiers Z - HP XP7 User Manual

Advantages
efficiency of the data
drive

Thin Provisioning Z advantage example

To illustrate the merits of a Thin Provisioning Z environment, assume you have twelve 3390-V LDEVs
from 12 RAID 1 (2D+2D) array groups assigned to a THP pool. All 48 disks contribute their IOPS
and throughput power to all 3390-A THP volumes assigned to that pool. If more random read
IOPS capability is desired for a pool, the THP pool can be defined with 32 3390-V LDEVs defined
using RAID 5 (3D+1P) array groups. This provides 128 disks to the pool and workload is spread
across all the disks. Up to 1024 LDEVs can be assigned to a single pool, providing a considerable
amount of I/O capability to just a few THP volumes.

Thin Provisioning Z workflow

The following illustrates the Thin Provisioning Z workflow.

Smart Tiers

Smart Tiers Z

After using Thin Provisioning Z software to implement a thin provisioning strategy, the array now
has all the elements in place to offer automatic self-optimizing storage tiers provided by Smart
Tiers. Using Smart Tiers Z, you can configure a storage system with multiple storage tiers using
different kinds of physical disk drives, including SSD, SAS, and external volumes. This can improve
the speed and cost of performance. Smart Tiers Z extends and improves the functionality and value
of Thin Provisioning Z. Both use pools of physical storage to define V-VOLs. Each thin provisioning
pool can be configured to operate either as a THP pool or a Smart Tiers Z pool.
Automated tiering of physical storage is the next step for thin provisioned enterprise arrays.
Automated tiering is the ability of the array to dynamically monitor and relocate data to the optimum
tier of storage based on performance requirements. It focuses on data segments rather than entire
volumes. The functionality is entirely within the array and needs no host level involvement. Smart
Tiers Z adds another layer to the thin provisioned environment.
Using Smart Tiers Z you can:
Configure physical storage into tiers consisting of multiple kinds of physical disk drives,
including SSD, and SAS. Host volumes continue to be configured from a common pool, but
Without Thin Provisioning Z
unused. I/O loads may concentrate on just a
subset of the storage which might decrease
performance.
With Thin Provisioning Z
bottlenecks in parity group performance.
Configuring the volumes from multiple parity
groups improves parity group performance. This
also increases storage use while reducing power
and pooling requirements (total cost of
ownership).
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