Thin Provisioning : Technology That Optimizes Storage Utilization

Thin Provisioning refers to a cost-saving method of providing storage in virtualized storage environments. Thin provisioning has several advantages over traditional. Full provisioning is designed in traditional provisioning to used the full capacity of an external hard drive for a given application, providing the application a good potential, but often translating into reduced utilization rates, a problem that increases costs and this can be addressed with thin provisioning.

Thin Provisioning : The Basics

Researching in the use of storage space, often shows the rate of utilization of storage achieved by the majority of companies do not even reach to 40 percent. This means that the buyers acquire more than double of the capacity they actually need, and that the extra demand also leads to need for higher cooling system.

The traditional method of supply also leads to an increase in the management of work loads due to the fact that the extra capacity that is not used, must be monitored and managed. If applications reaches their capacity limits and it is necessary to supply a complex activity may be involved in the management of this process. Greater need for management involves more personnel, with a consequent increase in costs associated with storage management. In addition, if an application has been taken offline for reprogramming, this down temporarily block the company’s business and result in danger of losses and profits.

Thin provisioning provides a way to address these limitations. With automatic allotment of system capacity to the applications, thin provisioning technology can help to achieve a maximum storage utilization by to 90 percent, while reducing consumption significantly.

How Thin Provisioning Works

Thin provisioning allows the users to allocate a large amount of virtual capacity for an application, regardless of the physical capacity actually available. During the initial setup, thin provisioning does not physically allocate capacity to the volume of required data, and the actual space is used only when there are records of data.

This method of allocation on demand ability not only optimizes storage utilization but also manages to simplify capacity planning and management. In order to help the users to monitor the utilization of storage systems, it automatically adds notifications that tells the user when the use of the total capacity is reaching the threshold set by the user. If the users want to increase the capacity, they can do so without any interruption.

With traditional provisioning, it is difficult to move data between logical partitions in a storage architecture. If thin provisioning is applied, data can be more easily allocated dynamically. So this means that the memory controller can move data dynamically between logical partitions based on how the operation planned the utilization of resources.

Thin provisioning also offers the possibility of further progress in the management and among these, Automated Tiered Storage is important. This type of deployment of tiered storage makes it possible to group the data into different categories and assign these categories to different types of storage media to optimize storage utilization.

The automated tiering ensures that applications have access to the specific services they need. High performance applications may be assigned to the levels, such as SAS or SSD, while the applications that need to lower the performance can be assigned to lower levels characterized by low performance, such as the SATA drives.

This ensures that the resources are not waste storage and applications can run smoothly. This technology also allows the automatization of data migration based on usage patterns.

Summarizing the results obtained from the use of thin provisioning, we can conclude that, Thin Provisioning helps to reduce the costs and reduces the need to add new HDD.