It’s been a slow week (the holidays) and a crazy one. I’ve started pouring out the thin provisioning series, with 10 posts so far, as well as launching a new video “talk show” about enterprise IT. And I’ve got a new post over at SearchStorage, too. Whew!
Is TRIM Useful For Thin Provisioning?
If WRITE_SAME can be a semaphore for thin un-provisioning, what about TRIM? It sounds like a perfect fit, and has wider implementation to boot! Let’s take a deeper look.
Talking Cloud Storage Gateways With Nasuni and Cirtas
I’ve got a new video podcast up and running: Raising the Floor is a series of discussions about the future of enterprise IT. I kicked the series off talking about one of my favorite topics: Cloud storage. It was a pretty broad discussion, all packed into less than half an hour, but I wanted to share a few excerpts.
The Bridge: Veritas Thin (Provisioning) API
Thin provisioning needs communication to function, and zero page reclaim is only the array side of the story. WRITE_SAME helps reduce I/O load, but the server needs to use it. Wouldn’t it be nice if the operating system, file system, or volume manager would use these commands to help recover capacity?
What is WRITE_SAME? Green Eggs and Ham!
One of the sticky wickets that holds back thin provisioning is the need to communicate when capacity is no longer needed. Enterprise storage arrays can reclaim zeroed pages, but writing all those zeros can really fill up an I/O queue. This is where WRITE_SAME comes into the picture.
