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 performance-based 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
Correct Answer: C
Explanation/Reference:
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
