A company is experiencing performance issues on their four node HP StoreServ 10800 configured
with 256x 300 GB Fibre Channel drives. A System Reporter analysis reveals that single tier of
Fibre Channel storage is under a lot of I/O pressure from an explosion of VMware servers running
high I/O messaging applications used to track package routes daily in an Oracle database.
There are 40x 50GB thin provisioned volumes that make up 90% of mostly read I/O activity during
regular business hours. The customer is upset and need a solution to quickly increase
performance for these critical applications.
Which solution should you propose to cost-effectively resolve this issue?
A.
Upgrade with 256 addition 300 GB drives and Adaptive Optimization to automatically move high
I/O volume regions to a RAID 10 CPG for better I/O performance
B.
Utilize Peer Motion to non-disruptively move the offending work load to an SSD optimized HP
3PAR StoreServ array.
C.
Upgrade with 32x 100GB SSD drives and Adaptive Optimization configured for performancebased placement in two storage tiers.
D.
Upgrade with 2 additional nodes and double host-facing Fibre Cannes ports to archive better
I/O caching across all array nodes when accessing small volumes
Explanation:
Customer case study
This section describes the real benefits that a customer derived from using HP 3PAR Adaptive
Optimization. The customer had a system with 96 300 GB 15k rpm FC drives and 48 1 TB 7.2k
rpm NL drives. The customer had 52 physical servers connected and running VMware with more
than 250 VMs. The workload was mixed (development and QA, databases, file servers) and they
needed more space to accommodate many more VMs that were scheduled to be moved onto the
array. However, they faced a performance issue: they had difficultly managing their two tiers (FC
and NL) in a way that kept the busier workloads on their FC disks. Even though the NL disks had
substantially less performance capability (because there were fewer NL disks and they were much
slower), they had larger overall capacity. As a result, more workloads were allocated to them and
they tended to be busier while incurring long latencies. The customer considered two options:
either they would purchase additional 96 FC drives, or they would purchase additional 48 NL
drives and 16 SSD drives and use HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization to migrate busy regions onto
the SSD drives. They chose the latter and were pleased with the results (illustrated in Figure 7).
Before HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization as described in the charts—and even though there are
fewer NL drives —they incur greater IOPS load than the FC drives in aggregate and consequently
have very poor latency (~40 ms) compared with the FC drives (~10 ms). After HP 3PAR Adaptive
Optimization has executed for a little while, as shown in the charts on the right,the IOPS load for
the NL drives has dropped substantially and has been transferred mostly to the SSD drives. HP
3PAR Adaptive Optimization moved ~33 percent of the IOPS workload to the SSD drives even
though that involved moving only 1 percent of the space. Performance improved in two ways: the
33 percent of the IOPS that were serviced by SSD drives got very good latencies (~2 ms), and the
latencies for the NL drives also improved (from ~40 ms to ~15 ms). Moreover, the investment in
the 16 SSD drives permitted them to add even more NL drives in the future, because the SSD
drives have both space and performance headroom remaining.
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx%2F4AA4-0867ENW.pdf