When your existing storage approaches the end of its affordable life, you probably wonder if there might be a better way to get the job done. It would be great if you could spend a lot less on storage capacity and not have to do so much planning for your RAID groups, semi-wide stripes, service levels, snapshots and remote copy space. It would be even better if you could avoid the same surprising and painful hidden professional services fees that make storage seem more like a luxury item than an infrastructure technology. Best yet, how would it feel to actually decrease your storage footprint during your next technology refresh, as opposed to watching it grow larger than you care to think about. Think you'll get those kinds of options from the Ever Mounting Costs company?
Like most I/O performance demonstrations, the video below is a bit reminiscent of watching paint dry, but if you understand what's going on, its pretty cool. 3PAR's Thin Conversion is a block data transfer function where empty blocks coming into a thin volume on a 3PAR InServ array are identified as such and not written to the receiving thinly provisioned volume space. The result is a significantly faster data transfer and an efficient, thin volume with high storage utilization when the transfer completes.
In this video, block data from a thick (or fat) source volume is being migrated to a new thin target volume using 3PAR's Thin Conversion technology. The demo shows reads from the source in red and writes to the target in blue so you can see the impact of 3PAR's hardware-based zero detection technology. During the demo, zero-detection is turned off and writes spike to a much higher level and then it is turned on again to show writes returning to zero.
Because Thin Conversion only writes actual data on the target and does not copy empty space, it's insanely fast and because it's implemented in hardware, there isn't any performance degradation in the controller. Also notice that the amount of storage needed on the target volume will be much less than on the source volume and storage utilization for the array will be much higher.
Thin Conversion is a great way to pare storage costs when you are considering a technology refresh. Instead of buying more new storage than you want and increasing the storage footprint in your data center, you can buy less storage, reducing your storage footprint. Thin Conversion works with both T-Class (Enterprise) and F-Class (Mid range) arrays from 3PAR and is independent of the types of drives in the system. Check it out, you might surprise yourself at how little you actually need to spend.
For the curious, your EMC sales representative can tell you when you'll get zero space reclaim and workload rebalancing for Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning...and remember, Symm Virtual Provisioning is $FREE!
Posted by: the storage anarchist | October 13, 2009 at 08:43 AM
Yes, and while you are at it make sure to remember to ask about the professional services fees you should expect to pay to make *free* Virtual Provisioning work for you!
Posted by: marc farley | October 13, 2009 at 09:03 AM
There are no professional services required to aquire, install, configure, map/mask, deploy, report, monitor, operate or use Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning.
It is truly FREE.
It is also simple enough to use that practically any storage admin can implement it without the documentation.
This whole slam-the-competition thing works better when you stick to the facts, Marc.
Especially when you're trying to differentiate on what is a non-unique feature that essentially has a one-time value for each LUN you convert from fat to thin.
As I've said before, what will you do once all your competitors offer the same functionality you've been trying to differentiate with?
Posted by: the storage anarchist | October 13, 2009 at 09:25 AM
So what are the facts about the percentage of customers that actually deploy your free software (instead of it being shelfware) in something beyond a test environment AND do not pay for professional services? The whole slam the competition thing works better when you don't try to distort the facts, Barry.
As to the opportunities for 3PAR to differentiate itself, in a world of "me too" competitors, if our competitors deliver them the way EMC did with V-max we don't have much to worry about.
But keep making all your grandiose promises!
Posted by: marc farley | October 13, 2009 at 09:43 AM
Hah - I call you out for the concocted distortions of reality that you are spewing about EMC, and your response is to accuse me of distorting the facts?
FACT: Symmetrix VP is FREE; 3PAR's thin provisioning isn't.
Symm VP is FREE to the installed base of DMX3, DMX4 and V-Max.
VP is FREE for test & dev.
VP is FREE for production.
What part of VP is FREE don't you understand?
Oh - and while I'm at it - the Symmetrix Migration Package, which includes both host-based and array-based software products that make it SIMPLE to migrate data into a Symmetrix DMX or V-Max is also $FREE! No PS required for that, either - a complete do-it-yourself package...
And it's FREE!
Posted by: the storage anarchist | October 13, 2009 at 11:34 AM