News
Thin Provisioning 2.0: A small step in storage, a giant leap for storage kind
October 2007 by By Doug Rich, VP EMEA, LeftHand Networks
In the beginning, there was shared storage and it was good. While it was all new no-one anticipated the amazing acceleration that storage requirements would have over time. Soon companies saw the benefits previously enjoyed by sharing storage resources on a network infrastructure being eroded. The storage area network saint for many became a bloated and costly beast needing constant attention, management and investment to ensure it did not get out of control.
One major step is the mainstream adoption of Thin Provisioning. This is a way to ensure that companies do not overprovision storage, but instead grow the storage capacity ahead of the curve of requirement. The term has become very popular recently with many companies claiming its birth. LeftHand pioneered Thin Provisioning back in 2003. It was labeled ‘Volume and Snapshot Thresholds’ – which is admittedly not quite as catchy as Thin Provisioning!
Thin provisioning has been an invaluable approach to pooling and provisioning storage allowing companies to grow the storage silos in smaller steps, deferring the costs of new storage hardware, until required. Thin Provisioning 1.0 has been useful, but with some limitations:
• Thin Provisioning has typically been an “add-on” standalone feature that seriously limited its full value in the storage landscape
• It places the provisioning burden on the storage personnel. SAN administrators have to ask themselves:
o How much space to allocate for snapshots…?
o How much will the volume grow over next 3 years…?
o What is the expected storage growth pattern for your applications…?
• There is almost by default an over-allocation of storage - just to be on the safe side -and then it is nearly impossible to reclaim space
However, a large leap in the development of Thin Provisioning has taken place. The launch of LeftHand Networks’ SAN/iQ® V7 in July introduced new and extremely powerful algorithms which make “just in time storage” and truly thin, dynamic storage provisioning a reality. Now Thin Provisioning 2.0 is capable of:
• Reducing storage acquisition costs even further by increasing utilisation up to 97% over Thin Provisioning 1.0
• Separating the concept of storage allocation from storage reservation: The SAN automatically manages the SAN administration; with Warning Alerts at 90% utilization and Critical Alerts at 95% utilization. The result is no pre-allocation of storage EVER
Diagram One: The not so Thin Red Line: Thin Provisioning 1.0 (Red) vs Thin Provisioning 2.0 (Green)
• Allowing companies to dynamically auto-grow the storage allocation under the volumes as they are being written to
• Thin Provisioning 2.0 reduces management cost and expertise required to implement
• Not requiring that customers predict their storage growth patterns. No more guesswork and no more crystal balls
• Thin Provisioning 2.0 being fully integrated with all other features of the SAN. Snapshots are, by default, always Thin Provisioned and Volumes and Remote Copy can be thin provisioned. With the 2.0 approach a volume is an attribute, which you can change on the fly. Storage managers can instantly switch between full and thin provisioned as required Storage managers can win the storage race. Thin Provisioning 2.0 can deliver the real value to enterprises that it has promised. It is indeed a giant leap for storage kind, just in very small allocation steps.
