I've always liked Fred Moore's analysis of our industry. Here is his latest writ on the Wikibon site where he talks about thin provisioning and dedupe:
In traditional storage provisioning, application teams guess at how
much storage they might consume and reserve that full amount on day
one. The amount reserved can be used only by that application and is
not available to others. This means that within a data center, large
portions of costly storage go unused, and consume power and cooling
resources even though no data is actually written to the disk.
That pretty much nails it. Not all thin provisioning implementations are equal, so look into the details of each vendor that you are considering. 3PAR continues to lead the industry in technical innovations for thin provisioning.
Fred was a mainstay of knowledge for StorageTek back in the day. It was mostly about tape then.
Fred's always been good at finding the universal truths about storage that transcend media. His big opportunity now will be to help us all through the entry of SSD to the mix.
Posted by: Pete Steege | February 26, 2009 at 05:42 AM