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consider. The first challenge with thin provisioning is proper monitoring. An application can fail if the physical storage space fills, so administrators must monitor the LUN carefully and proactively add more physical storage. “It’s a tradeoff between vigilance and savings,” said Ray Lucchesi, president and founder of Silverton Consulting Inc. in Broomfield, Colo. “You have to be able to keep ahead of the [storage utilization] curve.” Regular monitoring of virtualization storage may be problematic for smaller shops, often making thin provisioning more difficult to use.
How Much
and When? Just how much more storage to add—and when to add it—requires an understanding of each application and the way it is used. For example, if an application fills only its LUN
slowly, an administrator can probably add physical storage in fairly small and regular increments. Applications that tend to fill their allocated space quickly or erratically will probably benefit from a larger initial allocation of storage and larger increments as the LUN fi plication owners to understand each application’s storage requirements. Replication of a thin provisioned
LUN can also prove problematic. “If the thin LUN is a terabyte in size but in reality is only 200GB, the replicated LUN will use one terabyte only it won’t replicate only what’s used,” said Pierre Dorion, data center practice director at Long View Systems in Denver. As a consequence, data protection and disaster recovery may wind up wasting virtualization storage space that thin provisioning was designed to save.
Long-term savings with thin
provisioning will depend on the applications. In many cases, application owners ask for far more storage than the application actually needs, so it is entirely possible that a 1TB LUN may fill to just 500GB to 600GB over time and require little, if any, additional storage. However, other applications may eventually fill the entire LUN, resulting in little long- term savings. Flexibility with storage requirements is the key benefit to thin provisioning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephen J. Bigelow, a senior technology editor in the Data Center and Virtualization Media Group at TechTarget Inc., has more than 20 years of technical writing experience in the PC/technology industry. He holds a bachelor of science in electrical engineering, along with CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+ and Server+ certifications.
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