Despite dramatic cost-saving benefits, thin provisioning adoption has been relatively low up to now.

According to Adam Day, Sales Specialist for HP’s StorageWorks Division, HP’s 3PAR thin provisioning solution can confi dently achieve a 50% decrease in storage capacity purchases.

“And since HP’s 3PAR offerings were designed with agility in mind,” he says. “Customers can enjoy all  the benefi ts of technologies like thin provisioning immediately and without complicated pre-planning.” Traditional storage requires up-front capacity allocation and complex planning which usually remains  unchanged and unused unless modifi ed manually. The process of redistributing this storage capacity is  not only cumbersome, but disruptive.

For these reasons, companies typically have storage capacity utilisation rates of 25% or less. “With  traditional storage, it is common for both application and storage administrators to overestimate,  overpurchase, and overallocate capacity to avoid painful reconfi guration and future downtime,” Day  explains. Other than taking up needless physical space, this unused storage capacity unnecessarily  consumes power and wastes fi nancial resources.
Thin provisioning, says Day, can overcome all these challenges and more. So why has uptake been  slow thus far? The majority of current storage vendor implementations involve complex planning and  high performance or system overheads, which are likely regarded as inhibiting factors to deployment.

By offering a solution that is simple, fast, light, and flexible, HP 3PAR hopes to change current negative  market perceptions and set the standard for what true thin-provisioning solutions should offer. “People  don’t realise that thin provisioning can achieve the same effi ciencies and benefi ts that virtualisation  offered in the server space,” he says. “Perhaps if more people see it like creating virtual machines on  your storage, there will be less apprehension and more uptake.”

HP’s thin provisioning offering is further  enhanced by several competitive differentiators in this market:

• It has been built to support thin provisioning from the ground up by eliminating the diminished  performance and functional limitations that plague bolt-on thin solutions.
• Capacity is dedicated and confi gured intelligently, just-intime, and without active management. No more planning and confi guring storage into intermediary pools, no more compensating for  unnecessary ineffi ciencies, and no more disruptions.
• It is reservationless – it provide a dedicate-on-write approach to provisioning that draws and configures capacity in fine-grained increments from a single free space reservoir without  pre-dedication of any kind. Other vendors claim to offer thin provisioning but require a separate,  pre-dedicated pool for each data service level.
• It is are extremely fi ne-grained. With an allocation unit size of just 16 KB, there is no worrying  about small writes consuming megabytes or even gigabytes of capacity. Other vendors use coarse dedication unit sizes of 1 MB to 17 GB.
• A clustered architecture design supports thin provisioning by providing massive scalability within a  single system, so additional capacity can be easily added as needed.