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

According to , 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.



The Benefits

HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software reduces CAPEX by:
  • Minimising up-front disk expenditures and implementing a pay-asyou-go approach
  • Boosting capacity utilization to reduce disk spend over the long term
  • Enabling organisations to leverage falling drive prices more effectively
  • Reducing SAN ports and storage software fees (physical TB licensing)
HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software reduces OPEX by:
  • Reducing fl oor space, power, and cooling costs by getting rid of unnecessary drives
  • Eliminating application downtime for reconfi guration and capacity expansion
  • Reducing related storage, system, and DB administrator workloads
HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software improves ROI by:
  • Permitting more application deployments more affordably
  • Reducing initial costs to accelerate short-term return on investment
  • Allowing applications to be quickly and easily deployed
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: