HP 3PAR StoreServ Enterprise-Grade cMLC SSDs

Summary

• Understanding cMLC SSDs

• eMLC vs cMLC

• Endurance Compare

Understanding cMLC SSD Technology

SSD drive technology has evolved significantly as flash has become more mainstream in the enterprise data center, and over time vendors have abandoned using single-level cell (SLC) flash drives, graduating

instead to multi-level cell (MLC) drives.

Flash-optimized architectures such as HP 3PAR StoreServ have also begun transitioning to other technologies, including commercial MLC (cMLC)

drives

These enterprise-grade cMLC drives are not the same as the consumer-grade cMLC drives that are

not suitable for enterprise data centers.

The SSD technology used by HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage are enterprise-grade cMLCs, not the consumer-grade cMLCs used in personal computing.

Understanding the data

HP 3PAR has adopted SSD technology since 2010

We have over 5 years of telemetry data…. …hundred of thousands of SSDs…

Since then we have qualified and supported SLC, eMLC, MLC, cMLC

…and we know how they behave and compare in our Architecture.

MLC vs cMLCObservations while comparing eMLC vs

cMLC :

Customers deployment patterns and workload patterns are the same.

Performance levels are similar… actually data shows higher overall throughput

delivered by cMLC drives.

The drive failure rate of eMLC and cMLC are both very low (and much lower than

HDDs failures)

Overall average flash wear for both cMLC and eMLC is < 1%

HP 3PAR Flash-optimizations enable to use cMLC technology without limiting customers user cases while not compromising on resiliency, performance or

endurance.

Some data

Below is data from a given population of drives tracked over time. This enables us to track the wear of every single drive installed in it’s life time.

Sampling Window Months Average eMLC wear Average cMLC wear

July 2014 – July 2015 12 0.25% 0.7%

August 2014- July 2015 11 0.25% 0.3%

September 2014– July 2015

10 0.10% 0.15%

March 2015 – July 2015 4 0 % 0.01%

We look at all the drives that were

installed in a given month and then look at their wear level over

time.

At the current rate it will take over 100 years to wear out cMLC drives used in a HP 3PAR array

cMLC wear is higher due to the higher write throughput reported on these drives

A picture is worth 100 slides….

Life Left is how we track the amount of remaining write life of an SSD

1.92TB cMLC drives used in

production since June 2014 have worn out in

average 0.7% over the past

12 months

80.00%

81.00%

82.00%

83.00%

84.00%

85.00%

86.00%

87.00%

88.00%

89.00%

90.00%

91.00%

92.00%

93.00%

94.00%

95.00%

96.00%

97.00%

98.00%

99.00%

100.00%

SSD % Life Left over 12 Months

cMLC - Life Left

% o

f r

em

ain

ing

wri

te e

nd

ura

nce

Summary

• 3PAR Flash-optimizations enable to use cMLC technology without limiting customers user cases while not compromising on resiliency, performance or endurance.

• At the current rate it will take over 100 years to wear out most cMLC drives installed in HP 3PAR Systems.

How do we do it? Find out more in our technical white papers