A few days ago I posted a link to an article on the Register talking about rumours that dedupe was coming to 3Par. Well at HP Discover this week it has been announced that dedupe is now available for 3Par, but only on the 7450 array. The 7450 is HP’s all flash array it looks pretty neat and you can see an overview of it on YouTube
This is as far as I can think, the first divergence from all features and management being the same across the 3Par range. No official announcement has been made as to if this can be expected to filter down through the 3Par range. Logic would say HP are going to try and develop this for the rest of the range as class leading thin provisioning and then dedupe on top seems like a killer combination. The official news release states that dedupe plus thin provisioning will reduce capacity needs by 75% without compromising performance. It may be HP have introduced it to the all flash array first as it has the highest cost per GB and will therefore provide the greatest benefit or is it an architectural limitation? Only time will tell.
The technical white paper HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage: optimized for flash describes in some more detail how the dedupe is going to work. The clever stuff is done by the 3Par ASIC which assigns a hash signature to each unique incoming write request then as more write requests come in their hash signature is checked to see if it is unique, only unique pages are then written to disk. This is show in the diagram below
It will be interesting to see if any more big announcements relating to 3Par come out of HP Discover this week.
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