Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

3PAR just introduced their third-generation storage hardware, bringing a novel feature to the world of thin provisioning: Hardware-assisted “zero-detection” to convert standard storage to thin provisioning. Although only certain special-case users will benefit from this technology, it’s nice to see someone working on one of the pitfalls of the technology - that it’s really hard to convert from “fat” to thin, let alone to un-provision storage.

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Who’d have thought that EMC’s storage teenager, the Symmetrix/DMX, still had the ability to surprise us with something new? Well, as reported just about everywhere, EMC today introduced two major new features in the DMX. But don’t get fooled - this is still traditional high-end EMC stuff, and you had better be sitting down when you see the price!

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There has been lots of talk about the Data Robotics (aka Drobo) SOHO “storage robot”
- whoever they have doing their marketing deserves a raise! When I first heard about it, I was pretty puzzled - Why care about yet another storage enclosure, especially an overly expensive one that doesn’t even have NAS features? On closer examination, I have become a believer in the potential of the device and the company. Drobo offers some key ingredients that promise future success to me: a clear focus on usability, novel thinking to solve a real-world problem, and that great marketing I mentioned earlier. Click through for the full story… Continue Reading »

Symantec announced availability of the latest NetBackup revision today, version 6.5. This release is nearly complete in its buzzword-compliance, with enhanced support for VTL and backup to disk, data deduplication, CDP, LAN-free backup, SharePoint and Exchange, and even VMware! What’s the matter, Symantec, was Thin Provisioning not ready for release? How about green computing? Holographic storage? Yes, I jest…

Seriously, you gotta cheer when a “big gorilla” app like NetBackup adds this kind of technology, though. CDP and deduplication were great ideas but needed n application to focus them, and data backup is an excellent place to apply them.

And although the press release doesn’t highlight it, the application-specific recovery enhancements look especially tasty to me. NetBackup leverages VCB in VMware but can do file-level restore, which is awesome. And it can also do document-level or full-database restore in SharePoint from the same image. Over in Exchange land, it claims to be able to restore from snapshots instead of the backup image, speeding (all too frequent) recoveries.

So thin provisioning is everywhere! Well, at least that’s what you would think if you’ve read all the press releases this year. It seems like everyone has just announced and provisioning. So how can you tell them apart? Here are a few easy questions to ask!

1. Is it generally available? Many vendors have announced thin provisioning as a future feature in their next generation software or hardware. But not all of them are shipping it today, and some don’t plan on ever delivering it for the box you have on the floor.
2. How thin is thin? Many thin provisioning implementations use a fixed page size, forcing you to add more space than you want. Others are so granular, it makes me wonder how they manage the overhead.
3. Can my relatives get thin, too? Although some arrays can now virtualize other storage behind them, not all can apply thin provisioning to these “cousins”.
4. How about my brothers and sisters? Again, not all storage volumes are created equally. Some arrays can’t apply thin provisioning to snapshot or replication sources or targets.
5. If I get fat, can I go on a diet? Once space has been provisioned to a thin volume, you may not be able to reclaim it if it is no longer needed. Find out if your allocations can be reversed. Note: This is harder than it sounds to engineer!
6. How automated are my allocations? Find out how much overhead and effort you will have to put into managing your thin volumes. Operator time might be more costly than disk space in the long run.

Do any of the storage vendors in the audience want to comment on this?

This just in!

Hot on the heels of, well, everyone else in the world, Brocade announced that it was adding thin provisioning. Sadly, they have no storage to provision, but they added the feature anyway. “We felt it was important to offer this importantly important feature across all of our products,” Neil Oone, Director of Direct Director Marketing said. “Since every other storage company now offers thin provisioning, we assume it must be critical.” Brocade expects to deliver their thin provisioning support in Q5 of 2020.

In related news, HP today announced it would purchase Data Domain, Compellent, 3Par, and EqualLogic today to solidify their thin provisioning credentials. When told that Isilon had also announced thin provisioning, HP’s Director of Directness claimed “well we’ll just buy them too.”

Sorry to any vendors included here. Note that one item in the above story is true.

I’m finally getting settled back in after my physical storage and migration effort these last few weeks! I’m now located in the heartland of Wooster, Ohio rather than the headland of Massachusetts!

If it’s true that “stuff”, like gas, expands to fill all available space then at least I now have more space for my stuff. I’ve been burning up the Lowe’s parking lot trying to fill it though…

ObStorage: This reminds me of a trick a NetApp administrator friend used to pull on his users. He would adjust the size of the snap reserve to make his filers always look almost full. He swore that this kind of “backpressure” was the best way to control injudicious use of storage space by end users. Whenever he added a new disk shelf, he would immediately allocate the whole thing to snap reserve, and would then only open up 100 MB or so at a time! This smoothed out his provisioning, no doubt. Kind of anti-thin provisioning!