3 Keys for effective thin provisioning

By Alan Radding

Thin provisioning of course is a form of overbooking. With thin provisioning, you provision a certain amount of storage capacity while actually allocating less disk capacity than you provisioned for. The application thinks it has a certain amount of capacity available to it, when it actually has less.

Many people are concerned about thin provisioning because if you miscalculate or something unexpected happens you may find  yourself hitting capacity utilization thresholds. If this happens you will be forced to quickly acquire and deploy more disk capacity. It is not tough really you just need to plug in an extra disk. You normally will not run into problems if you know your applications, users, data and usage history. Here are a few keys you can do to ensure thin provisioning goes smoothly.

1.  Know your data -  The reasons that airlines overbook and for the most part get away with it, is because they have a detailed history of passenger behavior. They know what to expect for each flight based on different circumstances. You can of course do the same thing with storage. To take advantage of thin provisioning you have to know your storage usage and trends. This means knowing if your data is static or changing. You also need to understand the level of I/O activity.   Thin provisioning allows storage space that has been allocated to various applications or servers but not actually consumed to be shared. Given that so much storage capacity is vastly underutilized anyway, storage administrators who understand the data and usage patterns can feel confident practicing thin provisioning.
   
   
2. Focus of file system first  - You can be selective in where you use provisioning. Use it first for file services like CIPS and NFS. File storage usually is way over allocated anyway making thin provisioning easier and less exacting. With thin provisioning a company should be able to reduce the actual allocation for file storage by 20-30%. This provisioning is less necessary and more complicated when applied to databases and structured data.
   
   
3. Leverage all of your spindles for better performance - Thin provisioning can actually improve storage performance if you create thinly provisioned virtual volumes that cross as many disc spindles as possible. As a general rule, the more disk spindles handling the storage request, the higher the performance. With thin provisioning, you consume less physical capacity while getting better performance
   
   
4. Use in conjunction with storage resource management (SRM) and data deduplication - Like storage resource and data deduplication, thin provisioning is being built into storage products in various ways. It should be combined with data dedeuplication and SRM as part of an overall storage management strategy. Storage resource management will provide usage data that enables the organization to thinly provision the storage better. When combined with data deduplication, the organization stands to increase utilization of existing storage while reducing the need for additional storage capacity.

Storage virtualization combined with detailed knowledge of your companies usage patterns makes thin provisioning the most effective.