Storage supplier 3Par has invented an approach to
storage management which it believes will reduce the need for
businesses to purchase large amounts of capacity
up-front.
The technology, called Thin Provisioning, supports the way
applications and databases use storage. Craig Nunes, vice-president
of marketing at 3Par, said when a business configures an e-mail
server or a relational database, it is necessary to install enough
physical storage to support the maximum amount of data it is likely
to support, even though the application at present may only require
a small amount of storage to run.
The reason for allocating more than enough storage is to reduce
downtime. "You would need to take the server down to add extra
capacity," Nunes said. And adding storage to an e-mail server can
be extremely difficult once the server is running, he added.
Virtualisation is one way users can simplify managing storage for
different applications and operating systems, providing a pool of
storage capacity available on demand. However, Nunes said this
still requires physical storage in order to work.
3Par's approach is based on software that fools the application
into thinking it has the physical storage it needs whether now or
in the future. A user specifies the amount of storage they would
normally configure for an application and the Thin Provisioning
technology manages the physical storage currently available.
3Par said Thin Provisioning reduces capital expenditure by
eliminating or postponing the need to buy large disc
capacity.
As physical capacity is purchased and added over time, users
benefit from falling disc drive prices. 3Par said users could also
benefit from reduced licence fees for many storage software
products, such as SRM tools.
Other benefits from having less physical storage include
electricity and space savings. And by "allocating once", the IT
department needs to spend less time on storage planning and
provisioning, 3Par said.
Problems with existing storage
Over-requests for capacity
When application administrators request capacity, they account for
current needs as well as anticipated growth. To the extent expected
growth is uncertain, capacity estimates are increased.
Applications are less successful than
planned
Sometimes applications are not utilised as anticipated, and so
little growth in requirements occurs. Meanwhile, significant
storage has already been provisioned.
Replication of unwritten data
For many applications, additional copies of data are kept online,
which can lead to wastage.