Your IT department needs to deliver the best possible storage service levels for a wide range of applications as inexpensively as possible over the data lifecycle. Peak periods can wreak havoc on your service levels. They may occur during quarter-end, the holiday shopping season, high-volume market trading days or at other times, depending on the nature of your business. Since it can be extremely difficult to adjust your service levels on demand, most IT departments are forced to buy and configure stacks of infrastructure to accommodate peak periods. The result is a grossly over-provisioned environment.

Of course, the alternative to over-provisioning storage service levels is migrating data to different platforms or configurations to meet either peak or reduced demand for data access. But moving data within or between arrays —simply and non-disruptively —is a challenge, and is the greatest inhibitor to delivering optimal data service levels for the lowest possible cost. In fact, migrating a storage volume is a performance-intensive activity that, with traditional storage arrays, can interfere with the performance of online business applications.

And that’s not all. There may be significant investments of both time and additional equipment in order to implement advanced migration techniques. For example, incremental fabric-, host- or array-based migration facilities may need to be purchased and managed. In all cases, substantial up-front planning and provisioning is required for each scheduled migration activity. You may also need to justify the procurement, training, and management of multiple storage platforms, each dedicated to only a single class of service. In the end, service level optimization approaches that are based on data migration techniques impose serious drawbacks that have prevented them from being more widely adopted.

There’s hope…
You may feel forced to choose between over-provisioning versus rsiking required service levels. However, there’s hope. 3PAR® Dynamic Optimization is a simple and efficient alternative that enables you to “flatten the landscape.” You’ll never be forced to accept over-provisioned service levels again.

3PAR Dynamic Optimization is the first software solution to offer single-command, online, and non-disruptive service level optimization within a cost-effective and massively scalable tiered-storage array. You can now seamlessly optimize data service levels across all stages of the disk-based data lifecycle, achieving optimal data service levels at the lowest possible cost at all times. In seconds and with a single command, you can convert a data volume from one service level to another, online and non-disruptively.

Rather than maintain an over-provisioned service level at all times, you now have the opportunity to adjust to meet increased demand. For example, you can prepare for a peak period by easily converting specific storage volumes from RAID 50 to RAID 10, and then return to RAID 50 after the peak period passes. Alternatively, as data becomes older and less frequently accessed, you can use 3PAR Dynamic Optimization to assign less costly storage resources such as RAID 50 data protection and ATA-based drives.

With 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, over-provisioned service levels will be a distant memory.

For more information
Press Release: Dynamic Optimization
More on Dynamic Optimization
Storage Networking World: Look before leaping into tiered storage
Enterprise Storage Forum: 3PAR Makes Tiered Storage Easier
Byte and Switch: 3PAR Touts Dynamic Interface

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