As a greater percentage of IT infrastructures get virtualized, there are more demands than ever on storage architectures to handle the performance of intensified random environments. It has also driven the demand for higher performing storage to handle the growing demand without greatly increasing data center footprints. The increased concentrated workload produced by virtual environments has been the biggest accelerator for the storage industry over the past decade and new disruptive storage technologies have been introduced in the market to meet the demand.
New optimized storage controllers to handle higher performance, housekeeping needs, and the unique behavior of solid state technology is a must‐have design to achieve the higher performance solid state technology offers. The average fiber channel (FC) hard disk drive (HDD) performs at about 200 IOPS per drive while a solid state disk (SDD) performs in the tens of thousands of IOPS per disk. Traditional storage controllers that supported solid state devices (SSDs) without any optimization to support solid state devices are only able to support a few devices before quickly bottlenecking at the controller. Recently, some of these traditional controllers have been redesigned to handle the higher performance and unique characteristics of solid state devices.
Net effect for customers using flash optimized technology is improved performance for tier 1 applications, accelerated performance for virtual infrastructures and improved overall performance for any datacenter. Flash optimized arrays can offer response times in the microseconds unlike traditional HDD systems that offer I/O response times in the milliseconds. This demonstrates that flash optimized systems are a magnitude faster than traditional HDD systems.
HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage is flash optimized and has been optimally designed to specifically accelerate and improve performance for tier 1 applications and virtual infrastructures while offering a high level of storage efficiency and protection.