3PAR Delivers Server Provisioning on Solaris Boxes

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Disk array juggernaut EMC clearly has server aspirations, as shown by its acquisition of VMware in December 2003, and utility storage provider 3PAR also tipped its hand on its intentions in the server market this week as it launched new bare-metal provisioning capability for Solaris-based servers through its InServ storage servers. The bare-metal provisioning features, which have been available on Windows and Linux servers for a while, are now available on Solaris servers, too.

3PAR, which was founded in 1999 and which is based in Fremont, Calif., is something of an upstart in the disk storage business, and in this regard it is a lot like EMC was back in the late 1980s and early 1990s before its Symmetrix arrays took the server market by storm. 3PAR was founded by former Sun Microsystems server engineers (including Ashok Singhal, who was chief server architect at Sun, and Jeff Price, who was product development manager for Sun's midrange server line), and the InServ system, while not being based on Sun technology, has some attributes that are similar to Sun supercomputers. The InServ 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.

But the software in the box--which is called the InForm Operating System--is what really makes 3PAR's arrays different from the competition. To deal with the kinds of random I/O that big transaction processing systems have as well as the serial data that is inherent in many batch-oriented (and some supercomputing) workloads, the InForm OS knows how to spread OLTP data around the array to reduce I/O contention and how to line data up for sequential reads for data spread across potentially hundreds of drives. This is neat, but there is more. InForm also knows how to carve up disk capacity on the fly and move data around based on policies relating to how the data is used and the kind of performance that is required. For example, for data that must be secure for OLTP transactions, the InForm OS can create a logical triple RAID 1 mirror of a data set, and then physically put all of that data on the outside edges of a set of disk drives (where the rotational velocity is highest) to boost performance; conversely, it can take data that is less frequently used and make a logical RAID 5 data set and put the information physically on the inside tracks of the drives (where the rotational velocity is slower). The system also includes a feature that 3PAR calls "thin provisioning," which means that storage capacity is not allocated ahead of time (as is common on disk subsystems) but only as data is physically written to the disks as workloads are running. One common problem with SANs and other storage arrays is that companies often end up hugely overprovisioning their disk arrays.

While these features of InForm OS are neat, the ones that make bare-metal provisioning of servers possible are called virtual copy and remote boot. The virtual copy feature does just what other kinds of snapshot software does--it takes a data set and makes an instant snapshot of that data. These snapshots, thanks to thin provisioning, consume no disk space because they are read-only. Basically, the snapshot is just a pointer to the data set in the array, which multiple servers can access through the InServ array. The remote boot feature of the InForm OS does exactly what it says--if you hook up a server to the array, you can designate the InServ array as a remote boot device for that server.

According to Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing at 3PAR, the bare metal provisioning is what happens when you combine these two features together in a new way. To provision servers, you create a gold image of the entire server software stack you will want to populate. Then, you replicate them with virtual copy, turn them from read-only to write-capable, and allow a new server to hook to it through remote boot. The provisioning aspect of this is not that customers do this once per server, but that they can create hundreds of different server gold images and provision and reprovision servers as workload conditions dictate. Instead of taking days to create a new server image by hand, data centers can do it in minutes with the InServ array.

Moreover, high-availability clustering software generally requires sophisticated software for lashing together servers and storage in a means that allows a failover between a primary server and its backup. But with the bare metal provision in the 3PAR array, in the event that a server's hardware fails, you bring a new server online and point it at the old server's image on the InServ array and it is back in action. The InForm OS has its own volume manager, which means customers running Solaris boxes do not have to license Sun's Java Enterprise System or Veritas volume managers. Nunes also says that instead of patching a server, customers can create new gold images and reprovision those servers after the gold image has been patched. Patch once, provision many times.

The Inform OS supports attachment to nine different platforms today, including Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Irix, and Tru64 on the Unix front, Windows (2000 and 2003), the two popular Linuxes from Red Hat and Novell (both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, but only in 32-bit mode; 64-bit Linux is being tested now), and Novell's NetWare. 3PAR sells two arrays, with the S400 having four controllers and spanning from 10 to 12 TB and the S800 having eight controllers and spanning from 30 TB and higher. The company has about 100 accounts to date, and nearly double that amount in installations, says Nunes. In its Linux and Windows accounts that have used the bare-metal provisioning features, customers have seen a 70 to 80 percent reduction in the time and money they dedicate to provisioning and patch management--they spend a lot less time, and they make a lot fewer errors, too.

The bare-metal provisioning requires the InForm OS 2.2 release as well as the Virtual Copy 2.2 feature. InForm OS comes with the storage array, of which a base S400 configuration with a few terabytes of capacity costs around $100,000; InForm OS includes the Remote Boot and patch management features. Virtual Copy costs between $8,000 and $10,000 for a small configuration. On Solaris boxes, Solaris 2.7, 8, 9, and 10 are all supported; the most popular version 3PAR is seeing, according to Nunes, is Solaris 9. The bare-metal provisioning feature is currently only supported on Sparc boxes. "We are seeing reasonably good adoption of Solaris on Opteron, but not enough to support it yet," says Nunes. "But Opterons running Solaris are seeing good growth, and we have several customers who are entertaining the idea."