News
3PAR announces VMWARE VStorage Integration with 3PAR Space-Saving Technologies
July 2010 by Marc Jacob
3PAR® announced full support for VMware vSphere™ 4.1 and the development of a new 3PAR plug-in for VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). Already a leader in providing storage for cloud computing environments, 3PAR is working with VMware to support VAAI in order to deliver advanced server and storage virtualisation capabilities to improve virtual infrastructure performance, agility, and scalability for public and private cloud datacentres.
The new 3PAR plug-in supports three features of VAAI: Hardware Assisted Locking, Block Zero and Full Copy. The 3PAR Plug-in for VAAI and support for VMware vSphere 4.1 deliver the following benefits, targeted for large-scale enterprise and cloud datacentres:
– Greater scalability by preventing VMs from competing for the same resources. Hardware Assisted Locking reduces SCSI reservation contention that can impact performance in large environments. Reducing conflicting resource requests removes a barrier to virtual machine (VM) performance to enable greater VM density and scalability. 3PAR’s unique implementation of Hardware Assisted Locking takes advantage of the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC to handle data comparisons in silicon with significantly higher performance and throughput, which is especially beneficial in large-scale VMware vSphere deployments.
– Increased performance and efficiency by eliminating repetitive write commands. Block Zero offloads large, block-level write operations of zeros to storage hardware, thus reducing server workload. In addition, with the integration of zero-detection capability built into the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC, in combination with 3PAR Thin Persistence software, provisioning is further accelerated while capacity consumption is reduced since zeros are prevented from being written to physical storage.
– Enhanced agility with faster VM cloning and VMware Storage vMotion™. Full Copy increases agility by halving the amount of time required to perform common copy operations like virtual machine cloning and storage workload migrations using VMware Storage vMotion™. This is made possible by allowing the storage hardware to transparently manage large data movements, and by minimising host, network, and disk I/O activity. With the integration of the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC and 3PAR Thin Persistence software, built-in zero-detection capabilities further speed cloning and storage workload migrations while also delivering a capacity savings benefit.
– New quality of service capabilities via support for VMware Storage I/O Controls (SIOC). VMware’s SIOC implements new quality-of-service controls that automatically ensure that the most important virtual machines receive the desired I/O resources, even in times of congestion. 3PAR Utility Storage supports SIOC to ensure consistent performance levels across all VMs.
3PAR support for VMware vSphere 4.1 is available today and includes the 3PAR InForm® Operating System, 3PAR Recovery Manager for VMware®, and the 3PAR Management Plug-In for VMware vCentre™ Server. The 3PAR Plug-In for VMware® VAAI will be available in September and is provided at no additional charge.
