3PAR Offers Resilient Storage For The Cloud

Storage vendor 3PAR, which sells mainly to cloud providers and enterprise datacentres, has added increased resilience and agility to its storage server product line. The company said it provides the features at “a lower cost than traditional storage arrays”.

The features, which are included in the company’s InServ product line, are aimed at protecting users against disasters, preserving service levels in the event of hardware outage, and protecting against double disk failures.

3PAR describes the new software features as Synchronous Long Distance Remote Copy, Persistent Cache, and RAID MP (Multi-Parity).

The remote copy feature cuts the cost of remote data replication and disaster recovery by using the company’s thin provisioning technology, which the company said helps to reduce the volume of data written to disk. The feature helps to deliver low recovery time objectives and zero-data-loss recovery point objectives across any distance, said marketing VP Craig Nunes.

Persistent cache is a resiliency feature that allows always-on environments to handle both planned and unplanned downtime, said 3PAR, and means that performance is maintained even if a RAID cache or controller fails. Nunes said this means a RAID can be rebuilding in the background without users noticing. It works by re-mirroring the cache to other nodes in the cluster, and is supported on all quad-node and larger 3PAR arrays, including the InServ F400.

The company has added protection against double disk failure with a version of RAID 6, which extends RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block with two parity blocks distributed across all member disks. RAID MP is designed to deliver extra RAID protection and to work particularly well with SATA drives bigger than 1TB. RAID MP supports double parity modes of 6+2 and 14+2, which deliver performance levels within 15 percent of RAID 10, said 3PAR.

“The builders of public and private cloud computing solutions want to design resilient service architectures that offer both agility and cost-effectiveness,” said company president and CEO. “Traditionally, finding storage systems that facilitate this combination of service capabilities has been nearly impossible.”

Synchronous Long Distance replication is bundled in the latest version of 3PAR Remote Copy, while Persistent Cache and RAID MP are enhancements to the latest version of the InForm Operating System; all are available now.