Although I consider it the main stumbling block for thin provisioning, communication (or lack thereof) is being addressed with metadata monitoring, WRITE_SAME, the Veritas Thin API, and other ideas. But communication isn’t the only issue. Let’s talk about page sizes. You’ll often see vendors tossing this “softball” objection at their competitors, claiming that their (smaller) page size makes for more-effective thin provisioning. And that’s true, to a some extent.
EMC V-Max FAST: Coming in December … And 2010!
August 17, 2009 By 5 Comments
EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) was one of the most welcome annoucements made during the Symmetrix V-Max introduction. It would be a significant modernization of EMC’s Symmetrix line, and would be one of the first unique features of the Symmetrix V-Max line. But many, including me, were disappointed to learn in May that FAST [...]
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation
February 9, 2009 By 10 Comments
The first storage performance horseman is spindles: If you don’t have enough disk units, performance will suffer. I have been laying out storage on enterprise arrays since the dark ages, and one of the first lessons I learned was allocating data to avoid hotspots. I remember spending hours back in the 1990′s hunched over custom Excel spreadsheets [...]
3PAR’s Thin Un-Provisioning is Slightly Less Bad
September 2, 2008 By 13 Comments
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 [...]
