The complexity of managing IT networks and rising costs push almost all companies into the “lean zone”. For a decade now, businesses have been relentlessly striving to bring control over expenditure towards running, operating and maintaining networks and technology has been improving by leaps and bounds trying to meet these soaring demands. Of all these technologies for data storage, Thin Provisioning is a great option.
Thin Provisioning optimizes and fine tunes the efficiency with which storage space is allocated on SAN (Storage Area Networks), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and other network storage protocols. Thin provisioning works by allocating storage space efficiency and in a flexible manner among multiple users within the network by gauging how much space a given user needs at any given point in time.
Typically, in the storage models that we know of, plenty of storage space is allocated and this is usually a lot compared to the actual needs. Companies invest space in anticipation of growth and necessity. Often, the usage levels are quite low when compared to the amount of storage space available. This is a ridiculous waste of valuable storage space, computing resources, data centre upkeep costs, man power required to monitor network usage, electricity costs, hardware requirements, etc.
The way thin provisioning works is by managing data in “chunks” – think of it as a basic capacity management unit. When a user from a host computer tries to access computing facilities the thin provisioning system distributes the first available virtual storage chunk to the actual physical host – this provisioning boosts storage capacity utilization by a whopping 50%.
Thin Provisioning doesn't come without its own problems. For one, a growing business might quickly find itself strangled since it might just run out of storage space due to Thin Provisioning. Secondly, to allocate storage on an as needed basis, extra computing power for the storage management system. Third, there could be problems with data migration since Thin Provisoning works best with new data. If you have t migrate old data, Thn Provisioning systems don't have the kind of "intelligence" needed to process this migration.
All these problems, however, can be solved to a healthy degree.
If you have been looking for a great way to boost the utilization of the storage capacity of your enterprise networks, thin provisioning is a great choice. It’s not without its disadvantages but it does reduce the cost of ownership and increases your returns on Investment by a large measure.
Have you used thin provisioning yet? Do you think that thin provisioning has the potential to save storage costs?
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