Technologies in HP ProLiant Gen8 c-Class server blades

with iSCSI and LAN. It provides Virtual Connect wire-once connection management that streamlines processes, allowing

you to implement server changes in a matter of minutes.

Virtual Connect direct-attach Fibre Channel Using HP Flat SAN technology

Fibre Channel is the storage fabric of choice for most enterprise IT infrastructures. Until now, Fibre Channel required an

intermediate SAN fabric to create your storage solution. However, this fabric can be expensive, and can result in

increased complexity and IT infrastructure costs.

We have improved efficiency of server and storage connectivity with HP Virtual Connect direct-attach Fibre Channel for

3PAR StoreServ Solutions with Flat SAN technology. You can now connect HP 3PAR StoreServ systems directly to the HP

Virtual Connect FlexFabric Modules (Figure 9). That eliminates the need for an intermediate SAN switch complex, multi-

tier SANs, and excess networking equipment. This innovative solution requires no SAN fabric licenses. In an existing

fabric-attach environment, you can use the 3PAR StoreServ Solutions with Flat SAN technology to direct-attach and

fabric-attach storage simultaneously.

Figure 9.

More information is available in “HP Virtual Connect direct-attach Fibre Channel for HP 3PAR Storage Systems solutions

brief” at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA4-1557ENW.pdf

HP ProLiant Smart Storage

Over the last several years, the bandwidth and throughput of the memory and processor subsystems has grown

exponentially with advent of additional processor cores, higher bandwidth, more DIMMs, and other advances. And while

storage performance has grown steadily, it has not kept pace with other system advances. One such example of this

performance gap is in the area of database applications. In order to achieve industry leading benchmark numbers, HP

matches a number of hard drives to balance the load of ever-increasing processor and memory speeds. In the year 2000,

we used 180 spindles. In 2009 we used over 1,000 spindles. Now, industry demands go well past 2,000 spindles on

traditional hard drives.

For HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, we’ve addressed the storage performance gap with solid state drives (SSD) and SSD-

optimized Smart Array controllers. Compared to a 1,000-spindle hard drive solution, we’ve been able to achieve

maximum performance with less than 100 SSDs. A key to achieving this performance was to remove controller

bottlenecks associated with improved SSD performance. We’ve removed those performance bottlenecks in Smart Array

controllers for ProLiant Gen8 servers. Compared to previous generation controllers, the new Smart Array controller

delivers more than four times the I/O rate for read operations and more than six times the IOP rate for database