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by Bob Fine, Director of Product Marketing — July 28, 2008 |
On our last post we were discussing specific features of Compellent’s thin provisioning solution, Dynamic Capacity. And today we’re continuing that conversation to discuss potential green benefits, recovery and reporting.
Does thin provisioning result in any green benefits?
Thin provisioning is a must-have technology for a cost-effective, green data center. By purchasing and operating fewer disk drives, companies can significantly reduce power, cooling and physical space costs. Using thin provisioning alone, without any other energy-saving features, can help companies reduce disk drive counts on just a single tier of storage by 75 percent. Analysts estimate the storage utilization rates for traditional SANs are as low as 25 percent.
For example, a typical storage system—without thin provisioning—might require 274 146-GB disk drives to provide 10 TB of storage capacity (assuming 25 percent storage utilization). By contrast, a Compellent SAN using thin provisioning with the same type of drives would require only 69 146-GB disk drives to provide the same usable storage capacity. Eliminating 105 disk drives from the data center can mean a significant reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions in addition to the smaller footprint.
What about data migration and recovery processes?
Thin provisioning solutions can also improve efficiency and utilization when end-users transfer data from their legacy storage systems. For example, Compellent’s Thin Import feature in Storage Center 4.0 converts data from a “thick” provisioned volume to a thin-provisioned volume during the migration process. Unused space from the legacy volume is freed up to be allocated to another volume in the Compellent SAN.
In Windows environments, deleted files aren’t really returned to the storage pool even in thin-provisioned volumes. Often, users turn to a third-party utility to defrag the Windows volume to free up the unused space. Without these utilities even a thin-provisioned volume becomes thick. Compellent integrates a utility to recover this unused space called Free Space Recovery in Enterprise Manager, our SRM tool that automates replication, storage and green cost savings reports and chargeback, keeping volumes as thin as possible.
How extensive are management and reporting tools?
The Compellent SAN monitors capacity utilization in real time and provides information to administrators so they know exactly what the disk space consumption is at all times. The SAN sends alerts (like e-mail and text messages) based on pre-defined rules.
Enterprise Manager also shows storage utilization and consumption over a period of time including allocated space, used space and configured space for all disks and total space and used space for any RAID selection with any disk tier. Admins can also view ongoing CPU and memory utilization for each SAN to understand how utilization is affecting performance. They can generate “hero” reports to document storage ROI for senior management, charge back departments for storage utilization, and show savings on energy and carbon emissions.
As energy costs continue to skyrocket, we expect more customers to take advantage of thin provisioning technology as they start to realize the lowered disks and power and cooling costs associated with thin provisioning. Especially as organizations look to migrate data off of aging DAS and legacy SAN storage systems to more flexible next-generation storage arrays.
After reading this, are there still areas of thin provisioning that aren’t clear for you? Leave me a question, I’m happy to answer it.