It has often been difficult to find IT shops who accurately measure the improvements that they make in their shops due to the pressure of other demands. While this may make them seem more productive, it hampers their ability to quantify the improvements they have made and get credit for the monetary impact they have on the bottom line of their businesses.
With the economic down turn, we are beginning to find more IT shops willing to invest the extra effort to do this quantification and the results can be significant.
Recently one of our global financial customers completed a study on the use of Zero Page Reclaim, a feature of Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP). This feature which is available on the USP V and VM storage systems can reclaim allocated but unused capacity on existing open systems volumes without disruption to the application. Simply by using the virtualization capability of the USP V/VM, we can move a “fat” volume into an HDP pool, page by page, and after the move, reclaim the pages that are filled with zeros, so that the “fat” volume is reduced to a “thin provisioned” volume.
The net results are shown here in this table:
The value benefits that they were able to show were:
- Reclamation of about 185TB valued in excess of $2M USD
- Maintenance Avoidance of an additional $2M USD
- 40 to 60% reduction in physical storage
- 40% reduction in environmental requirements
- 40% reduction in real estate
- Improvement in operational efficiencies due to the ease of provisioning
The improvement in operational efficiencies could be further quantified through the ability to do “thin” copies, moves, replication, migration, and tiering of only the used capacity, the ability to quickly provision new volumes and expansion of volumes with pre-formatted pages, and the performance improvement of pages which are striped across all the disks in the HDP pool.
Zero Page Reclaim on the USP V/VM is one of the most effective tools for enhancing your current assets and providing significant cost savings that go straight to your bottom line.
Comments (8 )
RJP on 20 Mar 2009 at 4:49 am
Good post, Hu.
Storage Switzerland’s post on doing more with less misses an important point - Storage Informer on 22 Mar 2009 at 9:47 am
[...] pages of storage dynamically from a preformatted pool of storage, do thin moves and copies, zero page reclaims, and improve performance by striping pages across the width of the HDP storage pool. With storage [...]
Kulvinder on 23 Mar 2009 at 7:45 am
This is very good post
Hu Yoshida » Blog Archive » Free Assessment, Free Capacity License, Risk Free Services on 17 Jun 2009 at 5:39 am
[...] allocated but unused space. This service uses a feature of our Dynamic Provisioning product called, Zero Page Reclaim. Zero Page Reclaim is used after a migration or restore of a normal volume into a Dynamic [...]
Hu Yoshida » Blog Archive » Chunk size matters on 30 Jul 2009 at 8:54 pm
[...] format, we can reclaim that page and return it to the pool for other allocations. This is known as Zero Page Reclaim. With other types of thin provisioning where the page or chunklet is a subset of a larger chunk, [...]
Hu Yoshida » Blog Archive » Storage Switzerland’s post on doing more with less misses an important point on 17 Sep 2009 at 5:41 pm
[...] pages of storage dynamically from a preformatted pool of storage, do thin moves and copies, zero page reclaims, and improve performance by striping pages across the width of the HDP storage pool. With storage [...]
Capacity vs Performance: Thin Provisioning-Reclaiming Free Space « The StorageSavvy Blog on 26 Oct 2009 at 11:44 pm
[...] not actually save you any money on disk. This is where HDS’s Zero Page Reclaim can help. Hitachi’s Dynamic Provisioning (with ZPR) can scan a LUN for sections where all the bytes are zero and reclaim that space for [...]
Get Your Storage for Nothing and Your Bits for Free « Storage Post on 09 Nov 2009 at 8:34 pm
[...] along with its Thin Provisioning and Zero Page Reclaim capabilities, can actually reclaim the unused storage by virtualizing the application’s volume [...]