Thin Provisioning Advantage Example; Thin Provisioning Workflow - HP XP7 User Manual

Advantages
Reduces
management costs
Reduces
management labor
and increases
availability of
storage volumes for
replication
Increases the
performance
efficiency of the data
drive

Thin Provisioning advantage example

To illustrate the merits of a Thin Provisioning environment, assume you have twelve LDEVs from 12
RAID 1 (2D+2D) array groups assigned to a THP pool. All 48 disks contribute their IOPS and
throughput power to all THP volumes assigned to that pool. Instead, if more random read IOPS
horsepower is desired for a pool, then it can be created with 32 LDEVs from 32 RAID 5 (3D+1P)
array groups, thus providing 128 disks of IOPS power to that pool. Up to 1024 LDEVs may be
assigned to a single pool, providing a considerable amount of I/O capability to just a few THP
volumes.

Thin Provisioning workflow

The following illustrates the Thin Provisioning workflow.
18 Introduction to provisioning
Without Thin Provisioning
You must stop the disk array to reconfigure it.
As the expected physical disk capacity is
purchased, the unused capacity of the storage
system also needs to be managed on the
storage system and on licensed HP XP7
Storage products.
Because physical disk capacity is initially
purchased and installed to meet expected
future needs, portions of the capacity may be
unused. I/O loads may concentrate on just a
subset of the storage which might decrease
performance.
With Thin Provisioning
Some file systems take up little pool space. For
more details, see "Operating system and file
system capacity" (page 66).
When physical capacity becomes insufficient,
you can add pool capacity without service
interruption.
In addition, with Smart Tiers you can configure
pool storage consisting of multiple types of data
drives, including SSD, SAS, and external
volumes. This eliminates unnecessary costs.
HP XP7 Storage product licenses are based on
used capacity rather than the total defined
capacity.
You can allocate volumes of up to 60 TB
regardless of physical disk capacity.
Smart Tiers allows you to use storage efficiently
by automatically migrating data to the most
suitable data drive.
Effectively combines I/O patterns of many
applications and evenly spreads the I/O activity
across available physical resources, preventing
bottlenecks in parity group performance.
Configuring the volumes from multiple parity
groups improves parity group performance. This
also increases storage use while reducing power
and pooling requirements (total cost of
ownership).