In a nutshell, HP 3PAR Dynamic Optimisation Software is a software license/product enabled on the storage array itself that can provide a non-disruptive way to make changes to storage volumes hosted on the HP 3PAR Storage System.
Storage administrators can move volumes between different drive types or tiers (SSD, Fibre Channel, SATA/Nearline), leveling volumes as new drives are added into the array, all without outages or impacting any hosts that the system is busy serving I/O to.
So how is this good for virtual environments? It can be used to move running VMs between different tiers without impacting what the virtual machines are doing.
Similarly, as new drives are added to the array, the LUN that ESX is using can be striped across the new drives on the fly without taking an outage at the ESX server level. VMware’s vMotion technology offers somewhat similar functionality but at the host layer.
Dynamic Optimization works at the storage layer, which can be used to optimize storage service levels while VMware vMotion can be used to optimize CPU utilization across multiple hosts. Very similar to storage vMotion but all on the array itself!!
Pretty cool!
