With the announcement of the USP-V storage platform, HDS now offers HDP software and functionality for Thin Provisioning. Gartner, IDC, ITCentrix all have written extensively about this technology. All of the papers that I have read talk about the qualitative benefits, I would like to dig into to qualitative info on this technology.

Primarily, where is the economic sweet spot for thin provisioning.

First, thin provisioning has been called revolutionary, in that it can chance the behavior and usage patters, and buying patters for storage systems. This revolution comes comes by way of investments in:

• Processes defined and controlled for provisioning
• Capacity planning process
• CMDB
• Operational skills and perhaps some training
• Software tools, installation, and yearly maintenance

With an investment like this, there has to be a payback. My next blog will talk about the quantifiable benefits of thin provisioning, but I first want to help define the ranges for the best possible business case for thin provisioning.

With my research and reviewing this topic with several analysts, here are my findings for consideration:

1. Not all hosts and OS will be a candidate for thin provisioning
• Mainframe tends to be managed and tracked better
• Open systems are the more likely area to focus this technology
2. Some applications and file systems are better than others
• Unstructured data may not provide the best results
• Structured data should be the first area to plan for
• Some applications and databases pre-allocate storage blocks and volumes, so check with the TP vendor and the application vendors to ensure the right fit
3. Lower aggregate utilized systems are best
• If you are already running at 60-70% utilization (not allocation!) then thin provisioning may not have a strong case
• Thin provisioning can enable you to pick up 20 percentage points in the utilization category, so systems that are in the 20 percentile would be excellent candidates
4. The candidate storage needs to be pooled, (no DAS or SAS)
5. With my research, there appears to be a floor of around 40-50TB where the economics for thin provisioning and payback start to be strong.

So, if you are above 50TB, have chronically poor utilization of an open system SAN and have applications that play well with this technology, look to the next blog entry for some quantifiable calculations on determining the cost effectiveness and payback of thin provisioning.

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