3Par introduces new resiliency features

3Par has introduced a number of enhancements for its InServ storage server. The company said that the products are particularly suitable for service providers as they offer additional resilience to guard against server failures.

Craig Nunes, vice president for worldwide market at 3Par said that the company had introduced three product all aimed specifically at improving resiliency but the company was also aware that there was a need to keep costs low
He said that although the products had targeted at cloud providers, they also addressed many of the issues faced by enterprises.

According to Nunes, the newly-announced 3Par Remote Copy was an example of the type of cost saving being talked. The product has been introdued with the aim of reducing the cost of remote data replication and disaster recovery. Nunes said that it worked by synchronising a remote disaster recovery site by using asynchronous hourly mirroring - in that time all outstanding I/Os get copied across. He said that it was a good example of how 3Par's expertise worked in practice, pointing out that it was a low cost option and, more importantly, required no input from professional services at any of the sites.

The second of the new releases, 3par Persistent Cache is a resiliency feature built into the latest version of the InForm Operating System that allows "always on" environments to handle downtime. Persistent Cache eliminates the substantial performance penalties associated with "write-through" mode following a controller node failure. "Write-through" mode suspends the use of write caching for data integrity reasons.

Nunes said that this solved a particular resiliency problem. "If you have a dual - or a multi - controller array and you lose a controller, you go straight into write-through mode and can't cache the data. This gives you two problems, not only have you lost half of your resource but you have a degraded service too. So, in a four controller array, we have a high-performance low latency meshed architecture that gives the user cache re-mirroring and much more robust consolidation."

He said the new service had been made possible by a new architecture that improved the handling of the data. The changes had been implemented by changes in the underlying ASIC.

The third new product is a new version of RAID. RAID MP (Multi-Parity) is a version of RAID 6 technology designed to deliver extra RAID protection and to work with large disk drive configurations-for example SATA drives above 1 TB in capacity.