3PAR Supports IBM's System p5 Unix Servers with Utility Storage

Published: July 27, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While most of us in the world use RAID disk arrays or, if we are exotic, storage area networks and network-attached storage arrays, there are some more sophisticated storage options out there. One of them comes from utility storage maker 3PAR, and that company is now supporting servers that run IBM's AIX Unix variant.

3PAR, which was founded in 1999 and which is based in Fremont, California, is something of an upstart in the disk storage business. The company engineers hail from Sun Microsystems, including Ashok Singhal, who was chief server architect at Sun, and Jeff Price, who was product development manager for Sun's midrange server line. The company's InServ storage arrays, which began shipping in March 2004, consist of multiple, redundant disk controllers that are based on dual Intel processors that have been augmented with special ASIC electronics that provide a high-bandwidth, low-latency link between those controllers. The Intel chips handle the metadata that tells the array where a particular block of data is stored as information moves in, out, and around the inside of the array; the ASICs control the movement of data. The software that runs on the arrays can spread data around the clustered storage arrays in such a way to bolster the performance of online transaction processing and infrastructure workloads, and also can create triple copies of data (more than RAID 5 protection, for sure) and move data in lockstep across an array of disks so it is on the inside of a disk (where it moves slower) or to the outside of a set of disks (where it is faster), thereby tailoring the performance of data sets stored on the arrays. The InServ arrays also have what 3PAR calls thin provisioning, which means that capacity is not allocated to volumes until data needs to be written. You don't provision ahead of time, as you do on most arrays. The system does the provisioning on the fly.

The is not your grandfather's disk array.

In any event, the InServ arrays are now supported on IBM's System p servers running AIX, and IBM is pumped that the 3PAR arrays can virtualize storage while the AIX systems can virtualize processing and main memory through logical partitioning. 3PAR has also created clustering software called Multipath I/O for AIX, which can be used on p5 machines that attach to InServ arrays. Multipath I/O support has already been released for servers running Microsoft's Windows. Presumably, Bull Escala servers running AIX can also use the InServ arrays, too.

The InServ S400 and S800 storage servers support Solaris, HP-UX, Tru-64, AIX, Linux, and Windows hosts. The S400 array has two or four controller nodes and up to 192 TB. The S800 doubles the size of the server.

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