Thin Provisioning: Great concept, but how can it help me?

There is a new post on the Infoworld Storage Advisor blog which neatly and succinctly summarizes the provisioning challenge which every company faces. The entire article can be found here, and a quick excerpt follows:

To give a practical example, Windows Server is generally installed in a partition of at least 100GB, and often 200GB or more, especially if Exchange Server or SQL Server is installed. However, the initial install may actually consume only 10GB or so. With thin provisioning, the volume can be set to a virtual size of 200GB or more, but it will actually use only 10GB. As the amount of data stored nears a set percentage of full (often 80 percent), the storage system can either notify the admin to expand the volume, or with more sophisticated systems such as 3Par or Compellent, expand the volume automatically. If a volume is increased to 200GB (for that theoretical log file), once the problem is resolved and the log file deleted, the system can automatically shrink the volume again to reclaim the excess space.

If the admin is willing to trust the system, he no longer has to worry about the capacity of specific volumes. He can buy excess capacity for the array as a whole, which can encompass storage for dozens of servers, rather than having to play it safe for each and every server, only to have 50 to 80 percent of the internal or direct-attached storage on each server go unused.

I know what you're thinking. While this is fine for companies that already have a SAN in place, what about smaller companies? Well, there’s an answer there too – storage virtualization software such as DataCore’s SANSymphony can provide similar functionality using existing hardware and with a relatively small overall investment.

Thin Provisioning can be an incredibly powerful tool, but as with most powerful technology, care must be employed to assure best practices. Please contact us to understand what these are (after all, we did invent the concept!).