Getting Thin for the Fall – Twice the Utilization at No Extra Cost!
Often I am asked what our 'virtualization strategy' is. Like it should be one product or one solution. The reality is that we all have the same strategy – to help customers mask the complexity of managing multiple instances and increase the utilization of the assets, at the same time. For Sun Storage this means – disk virtualization, tape virtualization and with our partners, fabric based virtualization.
It's worth remembering that Sun has an incredible portfolio of virtualization across Systems and Software – which combined with the Storage really provides an unparalleled solution design. It is also very Eco friendly – more in the next blog.
We have just added another part to our disk virtualization portfolio - the Sun StorageTek 9985V system. Like its bigger sibling the ST9990V , the ST9985V has the ability to virtualize multiple storage devices from all vendors and present them to the application as a single pool of resources. It also has the ability to let the application see more storage than actually exists on the physical disks within the system.
So what?
In the past, the number one priority was to ensure that the application had access to enough storage - no matter what. This meant that data center managers had to allocate extra capacity in case there was a spike in demand for the application, and to ensure that there was enough space for all the data copies needed for business continuity or to recover from a disaster. In addition, adding storage when a new application was deployed lead to lots of storage devices that had to be managed independently, that couldn't access each other's resources, and that all had a lot of overhead. There had to be a better way.
Technologies such as the virtualization and thin provisioning capabilities in the ST9985V can help alleviate this inefficiency by giving all devices the same management interface and by reducing the amount of physical capacity required to support the application. More importantly, these technologies can help data center managers move towards a tiered storage architecture where data is stored on a device according to a pre-assigned value set by the organization. Since both of these considerations change over time, it's important that the tiered architecture have the appropriate tiers (primary disk, secondary disk, virtual tape, tape archive, etc.) and you have the ability to move the data from tier to tier according to policy.
Bottom line: Thin provisioning can increase your disk utilization from under 30% to over 60%. That's more power to your bottom line not your next disk array!
Posted at 09:00AM Sep 10, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[4]