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Practical Strategies for Optimizing HPE 3PAR Environments

Brett Allison, Director of Technical Services, Americas

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HPE 3PAR

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HP 3PAR – Volume Management

SSD

FC

NL

Chunklets: 1 GB chunklets of physical

disks treated like mini-disks

Logical Disks:Chunklets

from hundreds of drives form RAID Sets

SSD LDsFC LDsNL LDs

Common Provisioning

Groups (CPGs):Groupings of

similar LDs for provisioning

CPG_SSD

CPG_FC

CPG_NL

Virtual Volume (VVOLs): Host addressable either Tier or non-tiered.

Tiered VVOL

Non-Tiered VVOL

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HP 3PAR – Adaptive OptimizationCommon

Provisioning Groups (CPGs):Groupings of

similar LDs for provisioning

CPG_SSD

CPG_FC

CPG_NL

Adaptive Optimization Policy (AO) - Groupings of CPGsName Tier 0 CPG Tier 0

Warning (GiB)

TIER 1 CPG

Tier 1 Warning (GiB)

TIER 2 CPG

Tier 3 Warning (GiB)

Mode

Gold CPG_SSD CPG_FC PerformanceSilver CPG_SSD CPG_NL BalancedBronze CPG_FC CPG_NL Cost

Performance: Biases moving data to the fastest tierBalanced: Balances between performance and costCost: Biases moving data towards slower tiers

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What Case Studies Will be Covered?

Optimizing AO

Do I have enough HP?

Detecting imbalances

Are My Trends Good or Bad?

The Cost of Optimization

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Do I have enough Horsepower?

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HPE 3PAR Disk Storage System Dashboard [rating: 0.13]for all Disk Storage Systems by Serial

Rating based on DSS data using DSS Thresholds

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Read and Write Throughput (MB/s) [rating: 0.01]For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5'

Rating based on DSS data using DSS Thresholds

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DSS Throughput Thresholds

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Conclusion: Do You Have Enough HP?• IntelliMagic has over 20 years experience modeling storage

systems• IntelliMagic configures the make/model and the configuration

to set reasonable default thresholds‒ They can be adjusted as necessary

• In this case they have plenty of HP.

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Optimizing AO – “Suboptimally”

Free

Free

Free

SSD I/O Capacity

10K I/O Capacity

SATA I/O Capacity

0

500

In-useIn-use

In-use

Aver

age

I/Os p

er

Seco

nd

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Drive Read I/O Rate (ops/s)for all Disk Drives by Serial

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Drive Read I/O Rate (ops/s)For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5' by Drive Name

450 GB FC Drives

SSD Drives

NL Drives

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Drive Read I/O Rate (ops/s)For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5' by Drive Name

450 GB FC Drives

SSD Drives

NL Drives

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Drive Read I/O Rate (ops/s)For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5' by Drive Name

SSD

Dri

ves

SSD

Dri

ves

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Optimizing Adaptive Optimization Case Study• SSD Drives were not being driven• 10K 450 GB drives were hammered• Two changes were made:

‒ Configuring AO policies to limit the capacity on the 450 GB drive CPGs

‒ Setting aside some of the SSD capacity for Adaptive Flash Cache which operates outside of the AO Policy

• The busiest drives changed to be the SSD drives• IntelliMagic Vision made it easy to see the changes

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The Cost of Optimization

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HPE 3PAR Disk Storage System Dashboard [rating: 0.13]for all Disk Storage Systems by Serial

Rating based on DSS data using DSS Thresholds

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Front-End Read Response (ms) [rating: 0.13]For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5'

Rating based on DSS data using DSS Thresholds

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Front-End Read Response (ms) [rating: 0.56]For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5' by AO Policy

Rating based on DSS Storage Pool data using DSS Thresholds

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Front-End Read Response (ms) (top 30) [rating: 2.32]For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5', for Storage Pool 'BASE_ESX_AO' by Volume Label

Rating based on Volume data using DSS Thresholds

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Read and Write Throughput (MB/s) (top 30)For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5', for Storage Pool 'BASE_ESX_AO' by Volume Label

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Fibre Front-End Read Response (ms) [rating: 3.00]For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5' by Link IDRating based on DSS Links data using DSS Thresholds

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Fibre Front-End Read (MB/s) [rating: 0.00]For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5' by Link IDRating based on DSS Links data using DSS Thresholds

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Read (MB/s) (top 30)For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_5', for Link ID '1:2:2' by Volume Label

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Drive Read Response time rated by Drive Tier (ms) [rating: 0.02]for all Disk Drives by Serial

Rating based on DSS Drives data using Drive Tier based Thresholds

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Conclusion: Nothing is Free• There were front-end (Host to Host Adapter) impacts in

response time• Fibre ports were not constrained• Back-end was not constrained• Shifting the AO policy migrations to a later period caused the

response times to follow• Conclusion: For this system there was some overhead with

the AO Policy migration activity.

29Detecting Imbalances

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Fibre Throughput (MB/s)for all Ports by Serial

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Fibre Throughput (MB/s)For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_0' by Link ID

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Read and Write Throughput (MB/s) (top 30)For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_0', for Link ID '1:2:4' by Volume Label

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Read and Write Throughput (MB/s) (top 30)For Serial 'MONATYS_2849_0' by Volume Label where System contains 'UGKAA796'

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Conclusion: How Do You Detect Imbalances• Utilize the balance charts to see the front-end balance• Determine if the ports are saturated

‒ If yes, then Drill down on the volumes/systems on the ports to identify if there are more than a single hosts on the busy ports

‒ If not, monitor the ports

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Trends, Good or Bad?

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Front-End Response Time (ms) (top 20) [rating: 0.75]for all Clusters and Disk Storage Systems by Cluster

Rating based on Cluster by DSS data using DSS Thresholds

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Front-End Response Time (ms) [rating: 0.41]For Cluster 'GZGM499'

Rating based on Cluster by DSS data using DSS Thresholds

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Response Time based on Active Volumes (ms) [rating: 0.42]For Cluster 'GZGM499', for Volume Label 'WRHQ192_A_FCOD'

Rating based on Volume data using DSS Thresholds

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Volume Properties

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Conclusion: Detecting Trends• IntelliMagic was used to identify bad trends• The response time for volume WRHQ192_A_FCOD is trending

poorly. • Supporting disks for this volume do not include Flash• Improving disk response time for this volume may include

adding the volume to a policy that includes flash

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How Do I Proactively Manage My HPE 3PARs?Challenges Benefits

Know if AO is Optimized

Know if You Have Enough HP

Know if You Have Imbalances

Know if Trends are Good or Bad

Know Cost of Optimization

Understand if You’re Getting the Most “Bang for Your Buck”

Understand if You Have Enough Hardware to Run Your Workloads

Identify Artificial Constraints and Use to Plan Optimization

Identify Good/Bad Trends

Accurately and Quickly Identify Bottlenecks

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Thank you

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Email: info@intellimagic.com

Phone: 877 815 3799