Features - Storage Innovations:

3PAR PUTS STORAGE ON A DIET WITH THIN PROVISIONING

3PAR, a leading provider of Utility Storage, recently announced that it has begun shipments of 3PAR Thin Provisioning with the latest version of its InForm storage operating system. Thin Provisioning dramatically changes the way storage is managed and allocated to applications, saving millions of dollars in IT spending. With respect to the storage infrastructure, 3PAR Thin Provisioning delivers on the promise of organic Utility Computing.

An Unsolved Problem

Today, excessive amounts of capacity are over-allocated to applications to meet volatile growth expectations, assure service levels, and avoid future upgrade complexity. But the downside is that enterprise users estimate that "used" allocated capacity is only 25%-35% of total allocated capacity -- a monumental waste of capital and related operating expense. The problem of "allocated-but-unused" capacity is not solved by physical storage networking, since this capacity is already logically assigned to and "owned" by applications.

A recent study by Waltham, Massachusetts-based Glasshouse Technologies confirms the problem. In a survey of more than a dozen companies with over 700 servers, Glasshouse found that "a typical host might have 500GB of external storage, 375GB in volume groups, 240GB in file systems, and just 93GB used." The result is only 25% utilization of the provisioned 375GB of storage!

"Over provisioning is economically idiotic but it's the only way users have been able to keep up," said Steve Duplessie, founder of Enterprise Storage Group. "With Thin Provisioning, 3PAR is enabling a giant cell phone company to not only be more fiscally responsible, but to also set themselves up with a real storage utility. I spoke to them first hand, and they couldn't be happier."

Business Costs and Environmental Impact Soar

This allocated-but-unused storage costs enterprises millions of dollars a year. A typical enterprise requiring 10 useable terabytes for a set of projects might spend $2M on 40 physical terabytes to provision and make a single copy of this allocated capacity, assuming RAID 1 and a cost of $0.05 per megabyte. If the average overall utilization rate of the allocated storage capacity is just 25%, then $1.5 million of this capital expenditure has been wasted. This does not include the additional cost to house, power, and cool hundreds of effectively unused disk drives.

The environment also pays a hefty price. Using the Glasshouse ratios, and assuming disk drives (in multi-drive enclosures only) are used for 5 years before being discarded(1), the worldwide allocated-but-unused disk capacity today equates to roughly 42 million disk drives. To power and cool these unused drives, users pay roughly $2 billion per year in utility costs. 2,700 megawatts of electricity are needed, consuming 12 million tons of coal or 40 million barrels of oil annually to generate. Based on average U.S. generating resources, production of this amount of electricity results in annual carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 3 million automobiles.

Dedicate-On-Write Technology solves the problem

Traditional storage from monolithic and mid-range vendors uses Dedicate-on-Allocation technology. Customers have to purchase all the storage they want to allocate up front. 3PAR Thin Provisioning breaks the traditional link between purchased and allocated storage through innovative Dedicate-on-Write (DoW) technology. It allows users to safely allocate as much logical capacity as conceivably needed over an application's lifetime.

Meanwhile, physical capacity is drawn from a common pool on an as-needed basis. That is, only when applications actually write data to the storage array is physical disk capacity drawn from the pool. By keeping a small buffer of physical capacity, IT can quickly deploy new applications as needed, avoiding traditional budget or procurement delays and accelerating returns from new applications. The physical pool can be replenished at an appropriate rate while taking advantage of falling disk prices over time.

Thin Provisioning is distinct from the 'capacity-on-demand' solutions offered by some vendors. These programs require the up front installation and configuration of physical capacity that is then available to be allocated by the customer at some time in the future. Capacity-on-demand programs do not address the utilization efficiency of the allocated capacity at all, just the speed at which new physical capacity can be provisioned -- whether it will be efficiently used, or not. In most cases, these programs merely result in the customer being charged a price premium for the benefit of having vendors pre-stage drive inventory on-site.

The promise of organic Utility Computing is the flexible and autonomic delivery of scalable computing services to customers without having to dedicate physical resources up front. Like a true utility, Utility Computing allows customers to use as much as they need, but to pay only for their use, when they use it. 3PAR Utility Storage combined with Thin Provisioning represents the incarnation of this capability within the domain of storage today -- allowing true efficiencies to emerge in the use of corporate IT assets.

"We are perhaps the only storage vendor interested in selling our customers less disk drives," stated David Scott, president and CEO of 3PAR. "Using Thin Provisioning they can cut IT costs while getting more done. I don't know a single customer that wouldn't find that proposition compelling."

Thin Provisioning is available today. A base license for Thin Provisioning is bundled with every 3PAR InServ Storage Server. Additional licenses can be purchased for less than a penny per written megabyte of Thin Provisioning-based physical capacity.

(1) Sum of disk drives from 1998-2002 from Gartner 2001 Disk Storage Systems WW (Host Attached Internal RAID, Host Attached External RAID, External RAID Controller-based, & NAS).