Rumors Update

Previously on 3pardude.com I posted a link ‎through to Chris Mellors’s post HP Discover 3Par round up. The two key rumors were dedupe would become available across the 3Par range and that flash cache would be introduced.

 

Last week HP’s Calvin Zito, their online marketing guru and purveyor of YouTube videos with catchy tunes made a post on the HP StoreServ forum, his post went as far as confirming the rumours in an unofficial way and that’s official 🙂

 

Here are the important bits from the post:

 

  • We don’t have Cache via SSD yet – but stay tuned
  • At HP Discover, we also discussed that we’re using the same ASIC in the 7450 that is in the 7400, 7200, 10800, and 10400.  I’ll let you read the tea-leaves.

 

You can read the full post here.

 

Dedupe in the 7450 was previously discussed in an earlier post . It’s no surprise to see this is to be introduced across the range, as a diversion from this would have taken away one of 3Pars key selling points that all features and management are common to all models. Dedupe combined with class leading thin provisioning could lead to a very small foot print indeed.

 

With flash cache as it’s still not officially confirmed details are still sketchy, but essentially it is likely to be a technology that leverages SSD’s in the system to add a second layer of caching to the existing controller cache. The advantage of this will be a larger target for active data to ensure that this hot data is being served from controller cache or SSD’s. This to me would plug the gap of unpredictable work load patterns that AO misses. AO works by analysing a sample period and then moving data between tiers based on these patterns once the analysis period finished. Whilst this works well for predictable workloads that follow a pattern over time any workloads that do not follow a historic pattern would leave AO too late to the party and moving data that is no longer hot.

 

This will make for a really interesting fight with the other mid-range arrays from EMC and Netapp which already offer their own versions of dedupe and SSD caching.