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'Thin provisioning increases virtual machine density'

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CIOL Bureau
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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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3PAR was the first to solve the problem of low capacity utilization by breaking the traditional linkage between allocated and purchased capacity with the introduction of 3PAR thin provisioning software.

Since then, we have gone on to build thin capabilities into silicon with the industry’s first 'Thin Built In ASIC' and introduce software innovative products such as thin provisioning and thin persistence, which enable customers to not just start thin, but to get thin and stay thin.

In addition, we’ve worked with partners such as VMware, Oracle, and Symantec to develop a thin ecosystem.

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Over the years, demand for thin provisioning combined with increased attention to data centre power consumption and environmental impact has put pressure on many of the legacy vendors to follow suit by introducing bolt-on implementations, however 3PAR continues to set the standards with our built-in, multi-dimensional approach to thin storage.

CIOL: How do you differentiate yourself from competitors?

Arvind: 3PAR is not just different in its built-in rather bolt-on approach, but also offers  following advantages:

- Autonomic vs. manual provisioning: 3PAR thin provisioning is completely automated. Capacity is dedicated and configured automatically, just-in-time, and without active management.

- Reservationless vs. pre-dedicated pools: 3PAR uses a reservation less, dedicateon- write approach to thin provisioning that draws and configures capacity in fine grained increments from a single free space reservoir without pre-dedication of any kind.

Other vendors claim to offer thin provisioning, however, they require separate pre-dedicated pools for each data service level. These pools are actually silos of allocated-but-unused capacity that can require manual setup, provisioning, and management that impacts thin provisioning ROI and flexibility.

- Clustered vs. dual-controller architecture: 3PAR is the only vendor to feature the clustered 3PAR InSpire Architecture, which uniquely supports thin provisioning by providing the optimal platform for storage consolidation and massive scalability within a single system.

CIOL: What is driving the uptake of thin provisioning today?

Arvind: The savings that thin provisioning brings are huge.

Thin technologies not only helps reduce the up-front investment in storage capacity, but also the operational expenses associated with housing, powering, cooling, and administering that storage. Together, this can result in cost savings of up to 50 percent.

In addition, thin provisioning offers massive benefits when combined with other technologies, such as server virtualization. In fact, thin provisioning allows customers to increase virtual machine density so they can purchase and deploy up to 50 percent fewer physical servers to support server virtualization environments.

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