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Home > Products > Software > InForm OS

3PAR InForm Operating System

The software foundation of the 3PAR^® Utility Storage platform is the 3PAR InForm^® Operating System, which utilizes advanced internal virtualization capabilities to increase administrative efficiency, system utilization, and performance.

Complex and Costly: Traditional Provisioning

Traditional storage array provisioning relies on the manual assignment of coarse or entire portions of internal physical resources to individual application workloads. The complexity of planning, configuring, and subdividing fixed RAID groups—followed by the interdependent planning and mapping of balanced access to these groups—adds time and application risk to the task of storage provisioning. The brittleness of these manual arrangements erects barriers to business responsiveness, which in turn lead to generous but wasteful levels of resource provisioning.

Self-Managing and Efficient: Highly-Virtualized Provisioning

In contrast, the InForm Operating System eliminates array planning and delivers instant, application-tailored provisioning through the fine-grained virtualization of lower-level components. Provisioning is managed intelligently and autonomically. In addition, the massively parallel and fine-grained striping of data across internal resources assures high and predictable levels of service for all workload types. Service conditions remain high and predictable as the use of the system grows or in the event of a component failure. Traditional storage planning, change management, and array-specific professional services are eliminated.

Within the highly-scalable 3PAR InServ^® Storage Server, a multi-layered, highly-distributed volume manager virtualizes and spreads each application workload over all disks, loops, cache, processors, and ports. The InForm Operating System divides physical disks of many possible price/performance levels into uniform 256-MB "chunklets". When a user creates a volume, the Inform OS selects and groups chunklets from across the system into "raidlets" to meet user-defined levels of performance, cost, and availability—varying such parameters as RAID type, drive type, radial placement, and stripe width.

Simple Yet Powerful: InForm Administrative Tools

The InForm Operating System reduces training and administration effort through the simple, point-and-click InForm Management Console and the scriptable InForm Command Line Interface (CLI). Each interface requires only a handful of intuitive, well-supported actions or commands for complete functionality and system administration. Both management options provide uncommonly rich instrumentation of all physical and logical objects for one or more storage servers, eliminating the need for extra tools and consulting often required for diagnosis and troubleshooting. Open administration support is provided via SNMP and SMI-S.