Entries categorized under “Thin Provisioning”

The ramifications of organizations not getting data under control are significant. Recent analyst studies find that structured data stores may grow by as much as 60% annually and unstructured data stores by as much as 80% annually. Aggravating this situation, once all of this data is consolidated, the hardware costs associated with scaling the storage infrastructure to accommodate this data growth may be a factor of up to 10x of what it costs prior to consolidation. (read more)

Everyone sings the praises of how great and wonderful private cloud infrastructures are and what a difference maker solid state disks (SSDs) are. However Virsto has found that its software provides some of the secret ingredients needed to make private cloud infrastructures easy to manage and what it really takes to make SSDs sing. Today I complete my interview series with Virsto's CEO, Mark Davis, about what Virsto offers to bring out the best in private cloud infrastructures and SSDs. (read more)

One of the more revealing findings out of the recent DCIG 2012 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide was the gap between those midrange arrays that integrate with the VMware vSphere storage APIs and those that do not, as it was almost a case of the "Have's" and the "Have-not's." But among the "Have's" there are still levels of differentiation in vSphere integration that the Buyer's Guide did not examine in depth. (read more)

Backup redesign continues to be one of the hottest topics among end users for three years running with blog entries on that topic on DCIG's website consistently being among the most read. The problem is that many backup redesign offerings turn out to be just a rehash of the way backup has always been done which is inadequate when it comes to protecting growing virtual server environments. (read more)

Block and file storage platforms are many times viewed by enterprises as mutually exclusive designed to solve very specific application workloads. But the lines between what data should reside on block and file-based storage platforms have begun to blur. To alleviate this uncertainty a new bond between these two storage platforms has emerged with providers delivering them as a single solution, the latest evidence of this being HP's qualification of its X9000 Network Storage System (IBRIX) for use with 3PAR Storage Systems via its X9300 Network Storage Gateway (read more)

In a recent podcast HP Storage Strategist, Brad Parks, states, "Over the last 18 months HP has been beating the converged infrastructure drum." Well, that's great but more important than just beating that drum, HP needs to continue to provide evidence that all of its divisions are marching to that beat. This week HP StorageWorks division fell in step by enhancing the products in its storage portfolio to better deliver on HP's broader vision of delivering a converged infrastructure for all size enterprises. (read more)

Automated storage tiering (AST) seems to be getting ever more attention as more organizations move from physical to virtualized environments and look to use networked storage systems with AST to support them. But AST carries its own set of baggage and can potentially create as many problems as it solves, not the least of which is that it may not be as automated for all application workloads as some vendors may lead you to believe. (read more)

The topic as to what storage management features organizations really need on a storage array continues to be a hotly debated. In the last decade, we have seen a multitude of features propagate on storage arrays including disk striping, thin provisioning, and storage tiering just to name a few. But deciding which of these features are "nice-to-haves" and which ones are really "needed" in a virtual operating environment (VOE) becomes very difficult to make without a close examination of one's environment. (read more)

Any time that anyone in any size business starts to talk about how to improve IT efficiency while driving down costs the topic of server virtualization inevitably comes up. But enterprise companies need to take that conversation to another level and make sure they talk about selecting the right networked storage solution to support their virtualized servers as the wrong storage solution may negate whatever benefits that server virtualization provides. (read more)

The introduction of Database Availability Groups (DAGs) into Microsoft Exchange 2010 has been a godsend for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) with less than 1000 employees as it gives them the same Exchange availability and reliability features once reserved primarily for large enterprises. But for enterprises with more than 1000 users, Exchange 2010 DAGs creates new storage challenges in SAN environments unless these three techniques for optimizing SAN storage utilization and performance are followed. (read more)

The bidding war for 3PAR between Dell and HP continued yesterday with 3PAR first announcing that it had reached an agreement to be purchased by Dell for $24.30 a share and then, before the end of the day, HP countered with a $27 per share price offering. This back and forth has captured the attention of many of those who follow storage and even those who do not. But what is puzzling to many is, "What is so interesting about 3PAR that it is prompting Dell and HP to fight over it?" (read more)

Organizations have a proclivity to look at storage arrays primarily in the context of how much storage capacity do they offer. But as storage arrays add features such as deduplication and thin provisioning, storage efficiency is taking on new importance as an evaluation criteria when selecting a storage array. This is raising questions as to what role, if any, that a storage array's storage efficiency features should play in the final buying decision. (read more)

Not many individuals have ever had the opportunity to be worth $1 billion. Fewer still have had the opportunity to lose a billion dollars over the course of their lifetime. Then there are those privileged few that have both gained and lost that amount of money in just a few years. It was one of those individuals, Peter Bell, a general partner at Highland Capital, who spoke at the opening of this week's BDevent in Boston to share what he learned from that experience and how others can benefit from it. (read more)

There are so many virtual operating systems (VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer) competing for my attention, until now I had not closely examined Red Hat KVM's value proposition. It was only after I did a little research that I began to understand why 3PAR sees adding support for KVM as important. (read more)

Savings can evaporate as the hidden costs associated with managing a virtualized server environment become known. Among those costs, wasted storage capacity on individual VMs may be the most difficult to control unless an organization puts in place a storage infrastructure that can automate the reclamation of this storage. (read more)

This week I am spending a couple of days at Compellent's annual C-Drive conference in Minneapolis, MN where about 500 users, value added resellers (VARs) and Compellent sales reps are in attendance. Since a couple of years have passed since I attended the last one, I thought I would make the 6-hour drive from Omaha to Minneapolis to catch up on the latest going-ons with Compellent and gain some insight as to how they plan to recoup after their latest earnings stumble. (read more)

Two general techniques have now emerged that reclaim storage on thinly provisioned volumes: zero page reclamation and file system-based, intelligent storage reclamation. Both techniques identify when blocks are freed on a thinly provisioned volume and mark them as available for reclamation and restoration to the storage array's general storage pool. However there are other factors that come into play that should influence when organizations select intelligent versus zero page reclamation as their preferred method of storage reclamation. (read more)

When thin provisioning first started to gain some traction 5-8 years ago and show up as a feature on storage arrays, it is unlikely that many grasped how it was laying the foundation for the automated recapture of stranded storage capacity. Fast forward to today and we now see this happening with increasing frequency. The latest evidence of this is today's announcement from 3PAR that highlights how Oracle database users can achieve ongoing capacity savings when placing their Oracle databases on thinly provisioned 3PAR InServ Storage Server volumes. (read more)

The more I study how the AO feature leverages the underlying units of data (called "regions") with 3PAR systems, the more I understand its practical application in data center environments. Specifically, it does more than just automate the placement of data on the appropriate storage tier but automates it in such a way that it creates new operational efficiencies for IT managers. (read more)

Over the last few years thin provisioning has steadily moved into the main stream of storage management - so much so that not only has it found its way onto many leading storage systems but into operating systems as well. Clearly one of the largest endorsements of using thin provisioning at the operating system level came last year when VMware announced its inclusion of thin provisioning as an option within vSphere. (read more)

Capacity savings guarantees are still a relative rarity but can be more easily found as technologies like deduplication and thin provisioning find their way onto primary storage systems. However the bloom can quickly come off the rose when one starts to dig into the details associated with these guarantees. That's why 3PAR's recent 50% capacity savings guarantee announcement stands in stark contrast to other similar guarantees as its savings are not just a one-time event but potentially keep going and going and going. (read more)

Server virtualization is clearly becoming the end game for all size data centers. But as they virtualize their physical servers using Microsoft Windows Server 2008, new challenges emerge that range from managing each virtual machine's storage to effectively scaling up the number of the virtual machines (VMs) on each physical machine. This is where Virsto One, the newly introduced storage virtualization software from Virsto Software, comes into play. (read more)

Virtualization, consolidation and servers are becoming inextricably linked in the minds of mid-sized organizations as they look to reduce data center footprints and energy consumption while increasing server hardware utilization. Yet what can get overlooked during the consolidation and virtualization of their Windows applications is the development of a corresponding storage strategy. This is where the specifics on what is needed to deliver on an appropriate storage solution for this environment become a necessity. (read more)

The benefits of virtualization - server or storage - start to loose some of their shine as organizations come to grips with the reality of actually managing a virtualized environment. As the move from implementation to management, the hidden issues of managing virtualized environments become clearly exposed. It is for these reasons that storage providers like 3PAR are more tightly integrating their InServ Storage Servers with VMware's vCenter Server management console to provide better management of virtual data centers. (read more)

The dramatic changes that are currently sweeping through the storage industry are once again preparing to reshape the look of tomorrow's enterprise data centers. Among these changes, features and/or products like high availability, solid state drives (SSDs), server virtualization and thin provisioning are emerging as the predominant ones that IT managers are well under ways towards wide spread adoption. But as the implementation of these features begin, they create new storage management 'gotchas'. (read more)