Justin Vashisht 
WITH MWT WITHOUT MWT
Mixed workload technology is a small but very important piece of the converged infrastructure puzzle that allows the consolidation of your existing storage arrays. In the real world scenario where calculated and controlled benchmarks don’t matter, you have today’s environments that are very dynamic, especially when it comes to virtualized infrastructures.
Today’s storage arrays are subjected to heavy random I/O’s. One user can be in the process of saving a 1GB+ movie file (large I/O) while another user is working on a database updating someone’s contact information (small I/O). With traditional storage arrays these two different workloads are joined together and processed serially which delay small transactional I/O’s while the larger payloads are being processed. 3Par’s Mixed Workload Technology breaks up parts of the I/O and assigns a separate processor to each. One set of processing resources calculates where I/O’s should end up and where they originate from, while another resource is moving the actual data. The data mover’s job moves the data as it’s directed to do by the Control Processor. With that being said, the data mover doesn’t need to stop and determine where data should go. Conversely, the Control Processor doesn’t need to stop to move data, which takes time away from figuring out where data is or belongs. Best of all, each workload gets separate sets of cache! Talk about reducing contention, especially in today’s virtualized environments!
Now, you understand how MWT allows greater storage array consolidation. This combined with other 3Par technologies such as “Wide Striping” can dramatically reduce your storage array footprint. What used to require 8 controller nodes can potentially require only half!
3Par Mixed Workload Diagram
