HP ProLiant SL4500 server series overview

Technical white paper| HP ProLiant SL4500 server series
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Drive bays and storage
The HP ProLiant SL4500 server uses top-load drive
bays to maximize storage density with hot-plug LFF
HDDs (Figure 5). You can use a combination of SSD,
SAS, and SATA LFF drive types to meet capacity,
performance, and cost requirements.
Hot-pluggable drives make replacement quick and
easy; however, be aware that hot-pluggable drives
can also make it easier to mistakenly remove a
drive, resulting in lost data. To avoid this issue, the
HP ProLiant SL4500 server series mounts drives
using HP Smart Drive Carriers that offer the
following important benefits:
• Provide readiness, activity, and do-not-remove
indicators driven directly by the drive itself to
protect against service mistakes that could cause
loss of data.
• Allow dense drive packing while maintaining
thermal profiles.
HP Smart Storage technology
Each node in the ProLiant SL4500 server includes an embedded HP Smart Array P420i Controller. The Smart Array P420i
controller includes HP Smart Storage technology that offers HP Predictive Spare Activation, HP Smart Analytics, and HP
SmartCache.
HP Predictive Spare Activation
An infrastructure with hundreds if not thousands of drives will experience drive failures over time that can affect data
integrity and system performance. In particular, systems that use the Just a Bunch Of Drives (JBOD) storage strategy are not
very resilient and can be hit hard by drive failures. In addition, the rebuild process for a failed drive can severely affect data
availability and overall system performance, especially if the rebuild process requires the use of the network.
HP Predictive Spare Activation is a built-in function of the HP Smart Array P420i Controller that identifies and resolves
failures before they occur. HP Predictive Spare Activation monitors drive performance and automatically copies a drive to a
designated spare when a potential drive failure is detected (Figure 6). Since copying occurs across the internal SAS bus while
the suspected drive is still active, the process is quick—up to 4x faster than a typical rebuild—and avoids using the network
for a rebuild as in an Apache Hadoop environment. Once the copy is complete, the predictive failure drive is marked as failed
and ready for removal and replacement. Predictive Spare Activation does not degrade the fault tolerance of RAID logical
drives and works as an asset to RAID strategies.
Figure 6. HP Predictive Spare Activation protects data from drive failure.
HP Smart Analytics
HP Smart Analytics technology provides workload-aware intelligence for application tuning and optimized system
performance. HP Smart Analytics improves video streaming performance by up to 50% and transactional workloads up to
six times compared to previous generation servers. HP Smart SSD Wear Gauge increases solid-state media utilization and
uses smart analytics to predict the lifespan of SSDs and recommend when to update.
Figure 5. HP ProLiant SL4500 server series chassis uses a top-
load drive bay design (single-node server shown).