One of the biggest problems for thin provisioning is not the provisioning part: It’s fairly easy for a storage array to allocate on request: “I need a block; here’s some data I want you to write.” And the storage array just starts allocating, and allocating. But, the operating system never goes back and says “I don’t need that block anymore.”
thin provisioning
Thin Provisioning: Attacking Storage Utilization
Thin provisioning doesn’t take on the cost of capacity, it actually attacks the overhead of inefficient provisioning. Not all of that overhead is inefficiency, and not all of that can be tackled with thin provisioning. But some of it can. It’s a lot more of the cost than can be tackled by moving to SATA, for example. That I really like.
Storage is Not Getting Cheaper
Why do we care about thin provisioning? Because storage is not getting cheaper. If you went to buy a disk ten years ago, you’re going to spend about the same as would today, but you’re going to get a lot more capacity – a lot more capacity! The fact that we have terrible utilization of enterprise resources is really not helping us, and it’s not getting any better. It hasn’t improved because they are “doing storage” the same way.
Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, November 26, 2010
Oops! This never got posted, what with Thanksgiving and all. So, one week delayed, here are my interesting links from a few weeks back!
Overcoming The Limits Of Thin Provisioning With Automatic Provisioning!
I’ve never been a fan of thin provisioning as a storage management tool. Don’t get me wrong, I love having thin provisioning in my toolkit to overcome the limitations of conventional filesystems. Thin provisioning just gets under my skin when folks try to use it to solve business problems like long deployment time and slow purchasing cycles. If you attended any of the thin provisioning sessions I’ve presented at Storage Decisions, Interop, E-Storm, or elsewhere then you’ve heard my wistful dreaming of real automatic provisioning without the hackery of thin provisioning systems. But perhaps I didn’t mention that actual automatic provisioning actually exists today! It’s one of the many things I love about API-driven cloud storage!
