3PAR for the high-performance storage course

You can restrict virtual volumes to specific hosts, or to specific FC ports if you don’t know the worldwide names when you set up the volume. For highest security, you can even restrict a volume to a specific host on a specific port. Volumes are automatically striped across all available drives and controllers by default, although a volume can also be restricted to a particular controller or drive chassis.

Free IT resource Virtualization Insights from Top Experts - Learn how virtualization gets real! Sponsored by Dell Free IT resource Try Sun servers, workstations and storage products free for 60-days. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems 3PAR InServ S400 3PARdata, 3par.com Excellent  8.9 criteria score weight Capacity 9 20% Manageability 9 20% Reliability 9 20% Speed 9 20% Interoperability 9 10% Value 8 10% Cost: Starts less than $100,000 Platforms: Fibre Channel, Ethernet Bottom Line: The 3PAR InServ S400 and its bigger sibling, the S800, bring very sophisticated storage technology and high performance to the table at competitive prices. The thin provisioning feature and on-the-fly changes to RAID levels make it exceptionally flexible and expandable. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Experienced administrators will find the CLI responsive and easy to use. However, a few commands are available only through the CLI, because 3PAR integrates new features into the CLI before adding them to the GUI.

Service with a smile

A common storage-admin headache involves providing different service levels to specific hosts. When a project becomes more or less important, changing the service level usually requires backing up the existing volume, creating a new volume with the new service level, moving files, and disrupting services during the move.

Thankfully, InServ’s speed and flexibility ease that pain. I placed a load on a volume using Iometer, then changed the volume type from RAID 5 to RAID 1 and tuned the volume so only the fastest parts of each drive were used -- all without interrupting the availability of the volume. During this test, the volume reached a threshold of 80 percent of capacity and automatically expanded without disrupting service or performance.

The InServ also makes very flexible copies of data (full copies or snapshots). These can be cascaded, and at any point in a chain of copies, if you promote a copy to be the “base” copy, all copies up the chain will automatically reorganize to reflect the new control point. This makes it easy to restore missing or corrupted files and start over with corrected versions.

Creating copies and promoting or synchronizing them is extremely fast -- promoting a 2TB volume took me about two seconds. Remote copies can also be made to a second InServ system via IP.

With very high performance, reliability, and an innovative feature set, as well as an easy-to-use interface, the InServ S400 offers a lot for a price lower than many comparable systems. The only downside for large organizations is that 3PARdata is a smaller company with limited service capability, although its remote service option should make most on-site service calls unnecessary.