HDS announced support today for their thin provisioning (called Dynamic Provisioning) feature to be available in their mid-range storage subsystem family the AMS. Expanding the subsystems that support Thin provisioning can only help the customer in the long run.
It’s not clear whether you can add dynamic provisioning to an already in place AMS subsystem or if it’s only available on a fresh installation of an AMS subsystem. Also no pricing was announced for this feature. In the past, HDS charged double the price of a GB of storage when it was in a thinly provisioned pool.
As you may recall, thin provisioning is a little like a room with a bunch of inflatable castles inside. Each castle starts with it’s initial inflation amount. As demand dictates, each castle can independently inflate to whatever level is needed to support the current workload up to that castles limit and the overall limit imposed by the room the castles inhabit. In this analogy, the castles are LUN storage volumes, the room the castles are located in, is the physical storage pool for the thinly provisioned volumes, and the air inside the castles is the physical disk space consumed by the thinly provisioned volumes.
In contrast, hard provisioning is like building permanent castles (LUNS) in stone, any change to the size of a structure would require major renovation and/or possible destruction of the original castle (deletion of the LUN).
When HDS first came out with dynamic provisioning it was only available for USP-V internal storage, later they released the functionality for USP-V external storage. This announcement seems to complete the roll out to all their SAN storage subsystems.
HDS also announced today a new service called the Storage Reclamation Service that helps
1) Assess whether thin provisioning will work well in your environment
2) Provide tools and support to identify candidate LUNs for thin provisioning, and
3) Configure new thinly provisioned LUNs and migrate your data over to the thinly provisioned storage.
Other products that support SAN storage thin provisioning include 3PAR, Compellent, EMC DMX, IBM SVC, NetApp and PillarData.
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