HP Boosts Application Performance with 3PAR SSD Technology

Written by Nathan Eddy
August 1, 2012

Tech giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) (NYS: HPQ) announced an all-solid state drive (SSD) configuration for its 3PAR P10000 storage appliance — technology designed to help businesses with large cloud and virtualized environments boost their application performance.

The all-SSD configuration for HP 3PAR P10000 offers a single tier of solid state storage capable of supporting up to 512 SSDs per array, which avoids the increase in physical footprint, power usage and cooling expenses that come from limitations on the number of SSDs per array. For a data center with no room to grow, such technology can be extremely useful.

HP estimates the client cost per input/output operations per second is reduced by 70 percent (based on the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 benchmark results) with the technology and cost per kilowatt hour is cut by more than 80 percent.

The systems also allow businesses to combine SSDs with traditional Fibre Channel drives and deploy the company’s 3PAR Adaptive Optimization software, which distributes data to the right storage tier at the right time, to deploy autonomic storage tiering.

Many businesses are dealing with legacy infrastructures that fail to maximize the return on investment SSDs can provide because that infrastructure requires intensive data-tiering administration — something the SSD configuration and Adaptive Optimization software for 3PAR P10000 Storage is designed to reduce.

Storage and data center VARs in particular may see the sweet spot with this technology: HP points out the requirement to move data manually between storage tiers to optimize service levels is a time-intensive process that increases data center maintenance requirements. Often it can end up reducing the performance and cost benefits that SSDs deliver.

But while the cost saving and reduction of complexity for already-overwhelmed IT departments could be substantial, it’s no small investment: The 3PAR P10000 with an all-SSD configuration comes with a starting price of $350,000.