Q.) A partner student is inquiring about any information available about the best use for SSD drives and /or adaptive optimization or smart tiers. They are requesting any type of document which describes application data or I/O patterns which would benefit the most from either AO, Smart Tiers and/or SSDs ?
A.) You may want to refer them to the HP P9500 THP and SMART Tiers Best Practices Technical white paper
Executive summary
The P9500 introduced a new storage allocation concept called SMART. SMART expands on Thin Provisioned storage by automatically tiering data for best performance and allows the array administrator to pre-plan user capacity needs and allocate virtual storage based on the planned future capacity, but physically only consume the amount of disk space that the user is actually accessing. As a result, administrators no longer have to concern themselves with load balance application across faster media in addition to wasted storage—storage that has been allocated but is not currently in use by the users. This white paper provides an overview of the best practices for setting up SMART and THP on the P9500 array.