Technology considerations in selecting a direct attached storage solution for HP ProLiant Gen8 servers

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Technology considerations in selecting a direct attached

storage solution for HP ProLiant Gen8 servers

Technology brief

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 2

Interconnect technology......................................................................................................................... 2

Serial ATA ....................................................................................................................................... 2

Serial Attached SCSI ......................................................................................................................... 2

Interoperability ................................................................................................................................. 2

Expanders ....................................................................................................................................... 2

SAS/SATA link speed specifications and performance .......................................................................... 3

Drive controller technology .................................................................................................................... 3

Host bus adapters ............................................................................................................................. 4

Smart Array controllers ...................................................................................................................... 4

Storage infrastructure ............................................................................................................................ 5

HP SmartDrive carriers ...................................................................................................................... 5

Internal expander backplanes ............................................................................................................ 5

BladeSystem direct attached storage ................................................................................................... 6

HP hard disk drive categories ................................................................................................................ 6

Solid state storage technology ............................................................................................................... 7

SSD longevity ................................................................................................................................... 8

Over provisioning ......................................................................................................................... 8

Wear leveling .............................................................................................................................. 9

Wear Gauge ............................................................................................................................... 9

SSD performance ............................................................................................................................. 9

IO Accelerators .............................................................................................................................. 10

HP quality focus ................................................................................................................................. 11

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 11

For more information .......................................................................................................................... 12

Summary of content (12 pages)

PAGE 1
Technology considerations in selecting a direct attached storage solution for HP ProLiant Gen8 servers Technology brief Introduction .........................................................................................................................................2 Interconnect technology.........................................................................................................................2 Serial ATA ...................................................................................
PAGE 2
Introduction HP ProLiant Gen8 servers embody more than 150 design innovations. By engineering ProLiant Gen8 servers for enhanced solid state performance and by adding intelligent algorithms and analytics to manage performance, resiliency, and data protection in real-time, we made ProLiant Gen8 servers an all-in-one platform optimized for your storage workload demands. The direct attached storage (DAS) solution you choose for your systems affects their performance, cost, and usability.
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SAS/SATA link speed specifications and performance The true performance of a drive is determined by how quickly the data can be accessed. In the case of rotational media, that includes time for the requested bits to spin under the head―which is governed by the latency of track positioning, the areal density of the media, and the RPM of the drive. However, the speed of the interface electronics is often much greater than the speed of mechanically locating data on spinning media.
PAGE 4
Host bus adapters HP has embedded and PCIe interface HBAs available for environments that do not require the added security of hardware RAID but might need boot drives, JBOD, or software RAID arrays. HP H-Series HBAs support 6 Gb/s SATA and SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) and SSDs, backplanes within the server chassis, and SAS connection to external storage devices. These adapters also support multiLUN tape drives.
PAGE 5
Table 1: Characteristics of HP Gen8 P-Series Smart Array storage controllers P220i P222 P420 P420i P421 Blade/Rack Blade Rack Rack Rack Rack PCI Bus Embedded PCIe 2.0 x8 Low profile PCIe 3.0 x8 Low profile PCIe 3.0 x8 Embedded Low profile PCIe 3.
PAGE 6
BladeSystem direct attached storage HP BladeSystem servers can support two types of direct attached storage: drives on the blade servers and drives in external storage enclosures. HP SAS storage for BladeSystem servers support zoned direct attached storage as well as shared SAS storage to blade servers. This SAS architecture consists of an HP Smart Array Controller and a SAS switch connected to an HP Modular Disk System (MDS) or Modular Smart Array (MSA) storage enclosure.
PAGE 7
Table 2: Characteristics of HP hard disk drives for servers Entry drives* Midline drives Enterprise drives General description Lowest unit cost High capacity High reliability Lowest cost per gigabyte High performance Use environments Boot drive Non-critical storage External storage Mission critical Backups/archival High I/O Redundancy Workload < 40% Reliability Interface SATA 3 Gb/s < 40% Unconstrained workloads 2 X Entry drive reliability 3.
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Table 3: Characteristics of HP solid state drive categories Enterprise Value Enterprise Mainstream Enterprise Performance 3 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 6 Gb/s SAS 6 Gb/s SATA 6 Gb/s SAS General description SFF and LFF hot plug SFF and LFF hot plug SFF hot plug Capacities 60 – 480 GB 200/400/800 GB 200/400 GB NAND technology MLC SLC and MLC SLC Workload High read/low write Balanced read/write workload High read/write workloads Reliability/ 3 year service life with highly constrained write
PAGE 9
Wear leveling HP wear leveling technology uses sophisticated algorithms to re-map logical blocks receiving frequent writes to different physical pages. It evenly distributes erasures and rewrites across the storage medium to maximize endurance. Wear Gauge HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers have HP SMARTSSD Wear Gauge technology. Through configuration and management software, it monitors and reports the percentage of SSD drive life used and the amount of life remaining under the workload-to-date.
PAGE 10
Table 4: Performance comparison of a SAS HDD with SSDs for servers Technology SFF SAS disk drives (15K RPM) Value SSD Mainstream SSD Performance SSD 6 Gb/s SAS 3 Gb/s or 6 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA MLC/SLC NAND 6 Gb/s SAS MLC NAND 6 Gb/s SAS Dual port SLC NAND MLC NAND Sequential writes 160 MB/s 100 MB/s (64 KB) SATA MLC 225 MB/s 300 + MB/s SAS MLC 120 MB/s Random writes 300 IOPS 300 IOPS 10,000 IOPS 15,000 IOPS 160 MB/s 200 MB/s 230 MB/s 400 MB/s 380 IOPS 30,000 IOPS 30,000 IOPS
PAGE 11
Table 5: Performance data for HP IO Accelerators 160 GB ioDrive 320 GB ioDrive 320 GB ioDrive Duo 640 GB ioDrive Duo 1.28 TB ioDrive Duo Write bandwidth 750 MB/s 510 MB/s 1.5 GB/s 1.0 GB/s 1.1 GB/s Read bandwidth 770 MB/s 735 MB/s 1.5 GB/s 1.5 GB/s 1.
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For more information Visit the URLs listed below if you need additional information. Resource description Web address ProLiant Storage white papers www.hp.com/servers/technology HP Storage for ProLiant Servers http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/platfor ms/storage.html HP on Solid State Storage Technology http://www.hp.com/go/solidstate Send comments about this paper to TechCom@HP.com Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.