HP 3PAR and the Power of the SPC1

EMEA 3PAR Ninja Team July 2012 1

UNDERSTANDING THE SPC1 3PAR RESULTS AND WHAT THEY REALLY MEAN. HP 3PAR Storage Arrays are a best of breed next generation storage arrays that are the cornerstone of the HP Converged Infrastructure

initiative. HP 3PAR is designed to deliver enterprise IT as a utility service simply, efficiently, and flexibly. The arrays feature a tightly

coupled clustered architecture for resilience, secure multi-tenancy, and mixed workload support to fuel enterprise-class virtual and cloud

data centres. Use of unique thin technologies and fine grain virtualisation reduces acquisition and operational costs by up to 50%, while

autonomic management features improve administrative efficiency by up to tenfold per GB. All of this is clearly evident in the SPC1

numbers and should be leveraged as a factual discussion with your customer.

About the Storage performance council (SPC):

The Storage performance council is an independent body that is sponsored by nearly all companies that sell storage arrays. This includes

storage submissions and/or sponsorship but is not limited to, the following companies: HP, EMC, HDS, Oracle, IBM, Fujitsu, NetApp,

LSI. The goal of the SPC is to serve as a catalyst for performance improvement in storage subsystems, and to ensure fair and vigorous

competition between vendors as a means of improving the products and services available to customers. Exposing vendor marketing to

real world reality. The SPC is recognised as the industry-standard benchmarks for storage performance. As a result, customers are able

to more accurately assess the performance and price/performance of competing storage products prior to acquisition.

SPC Peer Review Status:

An SPC benchmark measurement becomes a new SPC benchmark result upon successful completion of the required SPC Audit and SPC

submission process. The new SPC result is initially given a Submitted for Review status for a minimum of 60 days during which the SPC

Peer Review occurs. The SPC Peer Review allows SPC members an opportunity to review the details of the SPC benchmark result and

raise any compliance issues resulting from that review. If there are no compliance issues raised at the end of the SPC Peer Review, the

status of the SPC benchmark result will transition to an Accepted status. If compliance issues are raised during the SPC Peer Review and

the SPC benchmark result is found to be compliant with the appropriate SPC specification, the status of the SPC benchmark result will

transition to an Accepted status. If the SPC benchmark result is found to be non-compliant during the SPC Peer Review, the SPC

benchmark will either be withdrawn or revised to become compliant and then will transition to an Accepted status.

The vendor storage configurations used in the testing are entered at that vendors discretion, and the Storage Performance Council (SPC) then measures specific metrics against the test results submitted. The metrics measures are the same metrics for all storage arrays as is

the I/O workload. The I/O workload itself is actually supplied by the SPC and represents a multi-tenant random workload that is 60%

read and 40% write, which tries to emulate as closely as possible typical customer workloads seen with in highly random and virtualised

environments.


The Storage performance council matrix below highlights specific metrics reported from the real world, independent and publically

available SPC performance benchmark, which highlight the merits of any HP 3PAR value proposition. The test results discriminate

between marketing hype and reality.

Best Performance + Lowest $/IO + Lowest $/GB + Less Complexity ASU TB = Built for


Regardless of the storage configuration used for the testing, the SPC executive summaries submitted by the relevant storage vendors

compare apples to apples testing criteria. Not all storage arrays are equal in terms of position and scalability in the market

(Midrange/high-end etc), so these factors are considered with regards to the three metrics measured. The SPC test results actually help

customers differentiate between marketing hype and actual reality.

The 3 metrics measured are:

1. Cost per IOP (bigger arrays have a higher cost and will need to produce the IOPs to get a good $ per IOP rating). This is measured by dividing the cost of the solution, including all hardware and software and 3 years 24 x 7 support

by the number of IOPs achieved. 2. Cost per GB (this measures how efficient your array is, the vendor has to report the percentage of usable storage

utilised (efficiency)

3. Complexity in setting up storage environment.

In all the SPC metrics all HP 3PAR excels, the figures populating the above table are taken from that vendors own reports that were

submitted to the SPC board and reviewed before publishing.

Note: EMC do not enter their arrays into the SPC, despite being one the off the sponsors of the SPC as they do not believe in

benchmarks (other than those performed behind closed doors in their labs where other vendors cannot see or challenge the results) the

CLARiiON entry from 2008 was actually submitted by NetApp.


WHY THIS MATTERS IN UNPREDICTABLE ENVIRONMENTS:

1) POINT TO HIGHLIGHT (LINEAR AND PREDICTABLE SCALABILITY, COST PER IOP):

Performance of the F400/T800/V800 is exceptional, but the reported performance is not the whole picture in terms of how performant

your architecture is as you scale, i.e. can you fully configure your array and achieve scalable performance? All HP 3PAR configurations

from the F400/T800 and V800 where fully configured in terms of maximum clustered storage controller nodes and maximum disk

configuration. This is an extremely important point for predicting future load and workload on any storage array. If a storage array can be

configured with 1000s of disks according to that vendors marketing specifications but in reality I cannot drive or achieve the expected performance from all of those disks, then my storage architecture is not truly scalable.

Generally these architectural limitations are due to bottlenecks within the storage controller technology. This results in performance

bottlenecks being encountered sooner than expected which then results in the customer having to purchase additional storage arrays,

which adds to storage sprawl, siloing and operational costs.

For example the HDS AMS 2500 scales to 480 disks but in the SPC testing HDS configured their AMS2500 with 352 disks, why? Even

though the performance figures of the HDS 2500 are very good, the controller technology cannot drive all 480 disk performance, if it

could HDS would have entered this array with the maximum configuration of disks. Disks = IOPs so once you have saturated the storage controllers there is no point in adding more disks as this will not deliver more performance or lower latency but

will in fact add to the cost of the solution and increase the cost per IOP. This is even more apparent with the larger storage

arrays, for example the HDS VSP.

The cost per IOP is derived from the total cost of the configuration (including all hardware and software) that the storage vendor entered,

with 3 years of enterprise 7 x 24 support divided by the IOPs achieved in the test. The IOPs achieved have to between 10 15ms latency to the hosts to be classed as valid (generally it is 10ms latency to host). All vendors report a maximum configuration that they support,

this is one thing, what configuration those vendors entered into the test is the reality of what they can actually scale to.

The HDS VSP can support over 2000 physical disks devices of different types yet in the actual testing submission (submitted to the SPC

December 2011) HDS only entered a configuration with 1152 disks (but with a full complement of cache and controller processors).

HDSs SPC IOP submission was approximately 270K IOPs, which is an honourable figure, but what this also highlights is that the VSP is not an easily or natively scalable architecture. Physical disks equal IOPs but if you hit the limitations of your controller architecture before you can drive all the disks that you can support, then it highlights a lack of a scalability with in that architecture.


2) POINT TO HIGHLIGHT (STORAGE EFFICIENCY): The second metric that the SPC testing highlights is the storage efficiency of your storage. If looks at configured raw storage and

associated usable storage after raid protection and storage system overheads. Of the available usable storage what percentage did you

present for usage during the test? This metric looks at storage efficiency and also highlights if a vendor has configured their LUNs for short stroking of the installed physical disks during the testing.

Short stroking is generally used to reduce the disk latency and hence achieve more IOPs at a valid latency for the test, than would

normally be achieved due to reduced physical head movement. For example I use disk devices of 300GB but configure the storage array

to only use a specific and limited portion of all the physical disks i.e. 40GB of the usable space after RAID overhead.

This practice is allowed by the SPC but the use of this tactic is captured when the cost per GB ($/Application Storage Unit GB) of usable

storage is calculated as well as the usable storage utilisation percentage. The lower the percentage of usable storage used the higher the

$/ASU GB value. This shows the cost of storage capacity for the performance achieved and is an extremely important metric for

estimating hidden costs and the real on-going cost of ownership.

For example flash arrays have an excellent cost per IOP ($/IOP) but extremely high cost per GB ($/ASU GB) so they are not really

applicable solutions today for multi-tenant solutions where high performance and cost effective capacity are required.

As can be seen the utilisation percentage for all HP 3PAR SPC entries is best in class and shows that the HP 3PAR Storage arrays maintain

performance and service levels regardless of how utilised they are. Customers can be assured that their HP 3PAR investment will be as

fast on day one as it is on the last day of its active life span regardless of how utilised it is. Sustained, cost effective performance under

high storage utilisation equals a drastically reduced total cost of ownership and higher/quicker return on investment.


3) POINT TO HIGHLIGHT (COMPLEXITY): The third metric measured by the SPC is complexity. This is specifically looking at how complex was it to configure your storage

environment to achieve the reported performance submitted during the testing. As we know performance is a valid and an important

metric assessed by customers wishing to implement a storage solution that will be fit for purpose now and in the future as their

environment and consolidation factors grow. However high performance with hidden costs is not desirable, cost per usable GB is one such

cost as is the complexity in the environment. If it was exceedingly complex to achieve the performance figures reported it indicates

another layer of on-going and hidden costs. Complexity measures the number of commands (including scripts) it took to provision and

present per 1TB of usable storage. Higher complexity indicates that that vendors storage array is not very agile or flexible or suited to unpredictable and random workloads, such as those common in virtualised server environments.

High performance is desirable but not if it so complex to achieve that I need to rely on the vendor to tune and setup the storage array

every time the I/O profile changes, then this adds cost and increases the customers time to market, which reduces the customer

effectiveness and competitiveness.

IN SUMMARY:

Any customer can confidently and comfortably consolidate many diverse workloads on our systems (e.g. thousands of different

VMs and/or workloads)

Each workload will receive attractive service levels (high IOPS with low latency)

The HP 3PAR system will scale, from 16 drives to 1920 drives, and still maintain performance predictability

The HP 3PAR system will not sacrifice low rates of capacity utilisation to achieve high performance

Simplicity is maintained independent of scale on all HP 3PAR Converged Utility Storage Arrays

ONLY 3PAR delivers consistently Best Performance, lowest cost per IO, lowest cost per GB and less complexity, a technology built from the ground up for ITaaS/Virtualisation

It can be seen from the results for all HP 3PAR arrays, that HP 3PAR bring high end functionality and availability in to the mid-range

space (F400) and the running costs and simplicity of mid-range arrays in to the tier 1, enterprise space (T800/V800).

HP 3PAR Converged Utility Storage Arrays are built for virtualised cloud environments and therefore many of the inhibitive commercial,

business and technical pain points, are eliminated. Pain points such as unpredictable performance, service levels and capacity growth

often associated with highly virtualised data center environments.

Documents

HP 3PAR and the Power of the SPC1