Don't hoard disk drives, there are plenty to go around

When you buy a car do you get all the gas for it up front?  Do you buy all the cafe lattes you are going to drink for the next 3 years all at once - and save them for whenever? 

Animals hoard things, like nuts, for instance.  Under unusual economic pressures, people sometimes hoard things too.  But we shouldn't have to worry about disk drives.  There seem to be plenty of them to go around. 

Regardless, many customers hoard storage capacity because their technology choices limit their behavior. When they buy storage they make best-guess estimates about how much they will need and then hope the estimates are close because it's such a pain when they are off.  You know what I'm talking about.

Thin provisioning makes all that a huge waste of time by letting customers buy only what they need when they buy it and allowing them to add more without spending weekends-at-work to make it happen. 3PAR has been providing thin provisioning to customers that don't want to over-buy storage for the last 5 years and we continue to lead the development of thin technology.  We also lead the industry in wide striping - a disk layout technology that delivers optimal I/O performance from every disk drive in a system.

These days we are very excited by the promise of reclaiming storage - which is a way to return unused storage capacity from a file system back to the array's available capacity.  This is an example of what we call "getting thin".  We are happy to see Symantec's Storage Foundation emerge as the "thin" leader from  the server-software side of the industry.

There are plenty of disk drives - we won't run out.  So with the current economic climate, do you want to over-buy on your next storage purchase or would you rather spend less and get more in return?

Comments

[Stephen Foskett]

Oh man - seeing my eeeevil press photo float across Mark's sky and morph into Jon's... There's a whole bag of hurt there! I should never have compared thin provisioning favorably to reckless driving! I've learned my lesson!

Let's adjust the metaphor a bit. Thin provisioning is like a credit card. Sure, you don't need to pay up front, but you'll sure pay if you overuse it! Both are useful in moderation, and both get you into a world of hurt without wise management.

[marc farley]

Yeah, I know... that was very EVIL me. Bwah haw haw haw haw!

A credit card is a decent analogy, but there are a few major differences:

1) TP is not prone to identity theft and fraud
2) You can't spend TP storage on an impulse item at Target
3) Nobody scores you for your use of capacity on a TP array

In general, TP is most effective to store corporate application data. End user storage should probably still be done with legacy (base) volumes.

[Martin G]

And in I jump! I disagree, End User Storage should be done with TP...just don't allocate it all to the volume; if you do, the evil users just consume it but just keep the level of the volume about 90% utililsed, enough to worry them....enough so that you can say; hey guys, we're running a bit short, time for some house-keeping. And then if you need to increase the file-system size, you can do it quickly and easily.

Play mind-games with your users...keep them in a constant state of fear! We've let them have it too easy recently!!

[marc farley]

Brilliant! Storage fights back. Maybe we could make it into a comedy show?

"I need more personal storage"
"Oh yeah, what for?"
"None of your business, I just need it"
"Oh, no no no, its all of my business - and you can't have it because there isn't any"
"If I told you what I wanted it for, could you find some?"
"Maybe"
"Maybe what?"
"What for?"
"Maybe you can find me some storage"
"Well, I can't do that if you won't tell me why you need it!"
"Ok, OK, OK, I need it to put up a web site for the company bowling team"
"Oh, the company bowling team eh?, well why don't you just go ahead and make sure your Granny can use it too to backup her old church recipes and scanned pictures of all the cats she's ever owned."
"Well now. Now that you mention it - that's what I really wanted it for."
"Why didn't you say so, I'll get you 20 Gig tomorrow, RAID 5 and replicated across the ocean. But I need access to the recipes."
"But those are family culinary heirlooms!"
"No recipes - no disk!"
"All right then, I don't want it. You can have your stupid storage"
"Wait, what if I look at them only once - and only very briefly"
"I suppose.....but how will I know that you only look once?"
"You can delete them."
"Oh, that sounds good, I'll store my Granny's digital heirlooms on the storage you give me and them I'll delete them!"