HP XP P9500 Storage - Manual (Page 18)

each of them (see (page 48) ). But then you set up a Thin Provisioning environment by creating one
or more THP pools of physical storage space that are each a collection of some of these 3390-V
LDEVs (THP pool volumes). This pool structure supports creation of 3390-A Thin Provisioning virtual
volumes (THP V-VOLs), where 42-MB pages of data are randomly assigned on demand.
For detailed information, see (page 69) .
When to use Thin Provisioning
Thin Provisioning is a best fit in an open-systems environment in the following scenarios:
•
Where the aggregation of storage pool capacity usage across many volumes demonstrates
largest performance optimization.
•
For stable environments and large consistently growing files or volumes.
•
Where device addressing constraints are a concern.
Thin Provisioning advantages
With Thin Provisioning Without Thin Provisioning Advantages
You can logically allocate more capacity than
is physically installed. You can purchase less
capacity, reducing initial costs. You must purchase physical disk capacity for
expected future use. The unused capacity adds
costs for both the storage system and software
products. Reduces initial costs
Some file systems take up little pool space. For
more details, see
(page 73) .
When physical capacity becomes insufficient,
you can add pool capacity without service
interruption. You must stop the disk array to reconfigure it. Reduces
management costs
In addition, with Smart Tiers you can configure
pool storage consisting of multiple types of data
drives, including SSD, SAS, SATA, and external
volumes. This eliminates unnecessary costs.
P9500 product licenses are based on used
capacity rather than the total 3390-defined
capacity. As the expected physical disk capacity is
purchased, the unused capacity of the storage
system also needs to be managed on the Reduces
management labor
and increases
You do not need to use LUSE because you can
allocate volumes of up to 60 TB regardless of
physical disk capacity.
storage system and on licensed P9500
products. availability of
storage volumes for
replication
Smart Tiers allows you to use storage efficiently
by automatically migrating data to the most
suitable data drive.
Effectively combines many applications’ I/O
patterns and evenly spreads the I/O activity Because physical disk capacity is initially
purchased and installed to meet expected Increases the
performance
across available physical resources, preventing future needs, portions of the capacity may be efficiency of the data
drive
parity group performance bottlenecks. unused. I/O loads may concentrate on just a
Configuring the volumes from multiple parity subset of the storage which might decrease
performance.
groups improves parity group performance. This
also increases storage use while reducing power
and pooling requirements (total cost of
ownership).
Thin Provisioning advantage example
To illustrate the merits of a Thin Provisioning 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. Instead, if more random
read IOPS horsepower is desired for a pool, then it can be created with 3390-V 32 LDEVs from
32 RAID 5 (3D+1P) array groups, thus providing 128 disks of IOPS power to that pool. Because
18 Introduction to provisioning