Storage News

3PAR Automates Sub-volume Tiering with SSD

3PAR has combined automated sub-volume data movement with solid-state disk drives in an effort to 'squeeze' more performance out of its high-end InServ Storage Servers. According to this InfoStor report, The 3PAR Adaptive Optimization software also includes Quality of Service gradients to prioritize data movement within an application profile based on performance or cost objectives.

Craig Nunes, 3PAR's vice president of marketing, says the steady decline in the cost of flash-based SSDs is making the drives more viable in enterprise storage arrays. However, he says that automated tiering is the key to driving the adoption of SSDs.

"'You get more [capacity] and IOPS for your dollar when you combine sub-volume tiering with SSDs and SATA drives, but you have to find a way to put the data on the right tier,' says Nunes.

"3PAR's SSD of choice is the 50GB version of STEC's MACH8 SSD. The drives are able to address multiple flash chips simultaneously to achieve 10,000 random read IOPS and more than 1,500 random write IOPS. The SSD can also achieve up to 100MBps for large-block sequential transfers."