Technologies in HP ProLiant Gen8 c-Class server blades

configurations, which provides the highest level of fault tolerance offered by Smart Array. ADM is over 1000 times more

reliable than two-drive mirroring. ADM generates three copies of the data protecting you from two drive failures, and

you continue to get good performance.

HP SmartCache

HP SmartCache utilizes SSDs for caching to accelerate workload performance. The solution uses HP Smart Analytics

technology to intelligently assign frequently accessed “hot data” to high-performance SSD drives. By providing

workload-aware intelligence to optimize system operations, this smart caching capability helps clients achieve higher

performance for transactional workloads. HP SmartCache performance outcomes are application dependent.

Dynamic Workload Acceleration

To optimize solid state media performance and eliminate controller bottlenecks, ProLiant Gen8 servers include an

embedded next-generation Smart Array controller optimized for SSDs with six times the performance of previous-

generation controllers. Recently, this technology helped HP ProLiant achieve the TPC-C 10 benchmark in the industry. To

drive further gains in application performance, we’ve doubled the cache capacity in our next generation servers for

faster writes and reads of data. Compared to the previous generation with traditional disk drives, ProLiant Gen8 delivers

over 200,000 IOPS per server with intelligent solid state storage technology.

Drive technology

With the new ProLiant Gen8 servers, we focused on the need to meet and exceed the industry’s growing requirement for

storage. Many of the ProLiant Gen8 platforms now have very flexible storage configurations to scale to various capacity

points.

Dealing with that storage density can be even more important. The new Smart Array for Gen8 has incorporated new

resiliency features to focus on density including:

 RAID advanced data mirroring (ADM) for three-drive mirroring

 Predictive Rebuild to eliminate fault tolerant downtime exposure windows

 Rapid parity initialization to deploy new RAID volumes up to 95% faster than the previous generation

HP SmartDrive

For our ProLiant Gen8 servers, we designed the HP SmartDrive for improved drive density, and drive status indication

has transitioned from LED-based in the previous generation to a more intuitive icon-based carrier. The compact drive

carrier design enables a 50% increase in spindle count (per server).

The drive’s front bezel includes a blue backlight for locating a specific SmartDrive selected from within the storage

software. An icon-based display reports the drive’s status. A “do-not-remove” LED helps prevent a drive failure

whenever anyone tries to remove the wrong drive. Other serviceability improvements include authentication, failure

logging, and integration with the HP Active Health System.

SAS and SATA Small Form Factor hard drives

The SAS architecture enables system designs that deploy high-performance SAS and high-capacity SATA

SFF and LFF

drives. This capability provides a broad range of storage solutions that give IT managers the flexibility to choose storage

devices based on reliability, performance, and cost.

SFF drives provide higher performance than large form factor drives. The smaller SFF platters reduce seek times

because the heads have a shorter distance to travel. RAID performance improves by increasing the numbers of spindles.

For more information about these features, refer to the technology brief “Serial ATA technology”:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00301688/c00301688.pdf.