BANGALORE, INDIA: Thin provisioning, though a decade old technology, is today making its way into the storage space in a big way thanks to the fast growing virtual volumes of storage.

Almost all of the significant players in the storage arena, such as Datacore, 3PAR, Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, EMC, IBM, have some or the other flavour of thin provisioning today.

Let's us today hear it from 3PAR, on this technology.

3PAR, who recently announced support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for servers, is also set to extend thin provisioned storage efficiency to Oracle databases.

Arvind Khurana, country manager, 3PAR, India talks to CIOL in an interview. Excerpts:

CIOL: What is the idea that goes behind the technology thin provisioning and how is it different from traditional provisioning methods?

Arvind Khurana: Thin Provisioning gives administrators the ability to allocate virtual volumes without purchasing or reserving storage up-front.

Thin volumes created with thin provisioning only consume physical capacity as data is written, which basically prevents applications from consuming storage capacity that isn’t being used.

In the case of traditional provisioning approaches (which rely on so-called 'fat' provisioning), storage is allocated to volumes up front. So these 'fat' volumes consume storage for applications before that space is actually needed to hold data.

As a result, enterprises estimate that utilization of allocated capacity with “fat” provisioning is around 25 percent.
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Whereas, with thin provisioning, physical storage is consumed in small quantities and only in association with data that has been actually written.

Thus, thin provisioning can save users hundreds of thousands of dollars in unused capacity and the resources that go into housing, powering, and cooling that capacity and also can alleviate substantial storage and host system administration.

CIOL: With regard to thin provisioning, 3PAR began early, so how did it evolve over the years?

Arvind: 3PAR is widely known as the thin provisioning pioneer, however in the decade since launching 3PAR thin provisioning we have become much more than just a thin provisioning vendor.

Our InSpire Architecture was designed to make storage more agile and efficient, which certainly helped us launch thin provisioning into the mainstream and make it a “must have” within data centres.