How About USING Innovations in Thin Provisioning to Bring an End to On-Call Hell?
It is almost haunting, but I can still remember back in the late 80's working as a DBA with DB2 on MVS. I was on a team of 5 DBAs and we rotated responsibilities. One hell-week out of the month one DBA would handle the storage on-call issues while the other members seemed to breathe a sign of relief--smiling from ear to ear, almost as if they were on vacation. A typical hell-week included the continual monitoring of free space, both within database objects and on disk packs. We were constantly reorganizing and compressing tables and indexes to squeeze out the last bit of free space for other tables and indexes that might be growing during the week. If you got lucky, you might find enough free space to create a dummy data set and hide true storage usage from the system administrators and other members of your DBA team until it was your next time on rotation. It was a sneaky environment, very slow to purchase additional disk packs, and not much different from other DBA teams that I spoke to at various DB2 functions.
While this might seem a long time ago and some things have changed, there is still an overwhelming number of storage, system and database administrators handcuffed by lack of storage flexibility. At one end of the spectrum are administrators that horde storage and those that over allocating storage for out-of-control applications on the other end. Just to give you an idea, I recently contracted for a consulting company that oversaw the remote administration for dozens of companies with hundreds of Oracle and SQL Server databases. Only about 1% of the databases were properly allocated storage and, in fact, it was a constant battle to convince these companies to re-distribute allocated storage or purchase additional storage. These environments were nightmare laden with poor application, system and database performance issues that could cause systems to crash or hang at any moment for lack of storage or contending performance problems.
I've lived the above nightmare for 20+ years--trying to show internal database growth patterns and their effects on performance for the current provisioned storage. The fact of the matter is, regardless of the type of application, companies consume storage at alarming rates, often at the expense of reason, and put their organizations that rely on application availability and reliability in jeopardy. The good news is, the storage industry has heard the cries of many administrators and corporate executives for a simpler method to control storage allocations and costs. Virtualization and thin provisioning provides storage administrators the ability to supply storage to applications and servers on a just-in-time basis. Through the use of shared, highly virtualized storage, an administrator can service the data growth requirements and the unpredictable needs of a changing business automatically.
Assuming you want to eliminate your storage headache, where should you turn? Virtualization has been around for a long time, but should you immediately run out and purchase an IBM mainframe just because it's been around the longest? Surely not! Might I suggest you first look at a recipient of the 2008 Frost & Sullivan North American Technology Innovation Award in the field of storage architecture? This year, 3PAR's Thin Provisioning received the award by notably "revolutionizing the storage industry and setting a new benchmark with the advent of 3PAR Thin Provisioning". The Frost & Sullivan's Technology Innovation Award recognizes new research that has resulted in innovations that have made a significant contribution to the industry. The award recognizes the quality and depth of a company's research and development program as well as vision and risk-taking.
3PAR's commitment to research, development, performance, and taking thin provisioning to new limits is easily seen in the following bullet points. You can also read a bit more on these points in a recent DCIG blog entitled 3PAR's New T-Class Storage Servers Make a Pop! in Storage.
Thin provisioning is a key component of the virtualized environment. But it isn't always easy to wade through all the vendor offerings and methodologies for implementation. Sometimes, those companies that are being recognized as industry leaders can point us in the right direction. Being recognized by Frost & Sullivan only solidifies that the research and progress being done by 3PAR is true thin provisioning and not representative of the storage hacks that only make it look like thin provisioning.
While this might seem a long time ago and some things have changed, there is still an overwhelming number of storage, system and database administrators handcuffed by lack of storage flexibility. At one end of the spectrum are administrators that horde storage and those that over allocating storage for out-of-control applications on the other end. Just to give you an idea, I recently contracted for a consulting company that oversaw the remote administration for dozens of companies with hundreds of Oracle and SQL Server databases. Only about 1% of the databases were properly allocated storage and, in fact, it was a constant battle to convince these companies to re-distribute allocated storage or purchase additional storage. These environments were nightmare laden with poor application, system and database performance issues that could cause systems to crash or hang at any moment for lack of storage or contending performance problems.
I've lived the above nightmare for 20+ years--trying to show internal database growth patterns and their effects on performance for the current provisioned storage. The fact of the matter is, regardless of the type of application, companies consume storage at alarming rates, often at the expense of reason, and put their organizations that rely on application availability and reliability in jeopardy. The good news is, the storage industry has heard the cries of many administrators and corporate executives for a simpler method to control storage allocations and costs. Virtualization and thin provisioning provides storage administrators the ability to supply storage to applications and servers on a just-in-time basis. Through the use of shared, highly virtualized storage, an administrator can service the data growth requirements and the unpredictable needs of a changing business automatically.
Assuming you want to eliminate your storage headache, where should you turn? Virtualization has been around for a long time, but should you immediately run out and purchase an IBM mainframe just because it's been around the longest? Surely not! Might I suggest you first look at a recipient of the 2008 Frost & Sullivan North American Technology Innovation Award in the field of storage architecture? This year, 3PAR's Thin Provisioning received the award by notably "revolutionizing the storage industry and setting a new benchmark with the advent of 3PAR Thin Provisioning". The Frost & Sullivan's Technology Innovation Award recognizes new research that has resulted in innovations that have made a significant contribution to the industry. The award recognizes the quality and depth of a company's research and development program as well as vision and risk-taking.
3PAR's commitment to research, development, performance, and taking thin provisioning to new limits is easily seen in the following bullet points. You can also read a bit more on these points in a recent DCIG blog entitled 3PAR's New T-Class Storage Servers Make a Pop! in Storage.
- 3PAR is the first storage vendor to incorporate efficient silicon-based thin technologies into system hardware.
- Innovative Thin Built In architecture - using zero-detection functionality to find unused capacity within "fat" data volumes with the ability to provide fat-to-thin volume conversions.
- Easily convert previously over-provisioned LUNs on older storage systems into thinly provisioned LUNs on the 3PAR T-Class storage systems.
- 3PAR's new T-Class storage servers recently set a new Storage Performance Council SPC-1 performance record for single-system storage arrays at near maximum disk utilization. (Not an easy feat and often manipulated by storage vendors - something that 3PAR did not do!)
- Easy out of the box setup without any complex configurations, performance tuning, or employing high-tech performance tricks required.
- T-Class storage servers implement functionality within an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) instead of a software solution to ensure that it will not steal valuable CPU and memory resources and not negatively impact application performance.
Thin provisioning is a key component of the virtualized environment. But it isn't always easy to wade through all the vendor offerings and methodologies for implementation. Sometimes, those companies that are being recognized as industry leaders can point us in the right direction. Being recognized by Frost & Sullivan only solidifies that the research and progress being done by 3PAR is true thin provisioning and not representative of the storage hacks that only make it look like thin provisioning.
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