Time to Get Thin (Provisioning That Is)
Utilization in storage is a big issue.
A bank told one of our team, Randy Chalfant, that their Unix based database gave them a 4% utilization efficiency. Unix will commonly have a 40% allocation efficiency. So here is the math for that bank... if they had a 100GB database that was 40% allocated with 4% utilization, then they are effectively using only 1.6GB of the 100 they bought. Not a great return!
Every customer I talk with says they need to do more with less, data is growing exponentially, budgets are tight, and yet they are forced to over-provision storage to make sure they don't run out of capacity. This week we are launching our new high end disk system with thin provisioning features. This plays well into Sun's overall virtualization strategy and offers market-driven advances in ROI and massively improved utilization rates. Improved utilization also means less boxes – which means less power – which means less CO2 – which means, eco-friendly!
It surprises some, but we've enjoyed some great wins over the five year history of the high end disk portfolio, the Sun StorageTek 9900 family: with over 2700 machines installed and over $2b in total revenues to Sun. The good news is that we'll be rolling the product out officially in early July and naming it StorageTek 9990V. It'll be just what the customers want – a high performance solution packed with advanced data services features that are actually pretty cool and clearly differentiate it from the competition in the market.
Posted at 06:00AM May 22, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[0]