Storage Utilization and Thin Provisioning are more than buzzwords
Companies large and small have always looked for ways to improve efficiencies and garner a greater return on investments.
This might seem to go without saying, but what's interesting is that Data Storage has historically been an exception. Ten years ago, the majority of data was stored on direct attached disks and storage utilization averaged 25-30%. The advent of affordable networked storage didn't change much within the storage world, it just created a central place to over-provision the storage instead of tying it to individual servers. Storage still suffered from the same problem - volumes still had to be assigned to hosts and those volumes were hard to expand. That made it necessary to provision as much or more storage to each volume that you would ever conceive of needing.
The point is, for some reason, business has not been proactive in seeking out more efficient and valuable storage solutions. So much for progress, right?
But lately, there has been good news. In a recent Computerworld news analysis article Wasted Space, Lucas Merian makes a great case for thin provisioning. What to take away from it is simple, straightforward and useful - Companies save money by using thin provisioned volumes. And when it comes to this, Compellent has found itself ahead of the market.
Compellent has built it's product from the ground up to enable thin provisioned volumes, which makes things much easier for customers. Much easier. Customers who use this product get thin provisioning for every volume with no performance or cost penalty.
So there's my recommendation. Go check out the Compellent website and see for yourself.
Call or email me when you're ready to save some space.
Rob