Channel Strategies for the CIOThin provisioning driven by technology advances, best practices
Requires Free Membership to View
still has its detractors, but the technology has made it into the mainstream and can play a prominent role as storage efficiency needs become more important. The technology is still evolving with recent advances around thin reclamation, and administrators say following best practicess help avoid problems with underprovisioning. Thin provisioning, pioneered by small vendors such as 3PAR (now part of Hewlett-Packard Co.) and Compellent Technologies (which Dell Inc. plans to acquire) that have been acquired by larger companies, is a method of allocating storage to servers on a just-enough and just-in-time basis.
According to the TheInfoPro's most recent 2010 end-user survey, approximately 51% of Fortune 1000 and midsized enterprise IT organizations use thin provisioning, with 25% piloting or planning to implement thin provisioning. Fewer than 25% say they don't plan to use it. Thin provisioning ranks as the number two technology behind Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) on the analyst firm's Heat Index, said Marco Coulter, TheInfoPro's managing director of storage.
Find out how to address thin provisioning storage problems in this tip.
A look ahead: The data storage industry in 2011
Nobody has all the answers for what will happen in the data storage industry in 2011, but here is a list of the best questions to ask entering the new year:
What will Dell Inc. do for an encore? Will Cisco Systems Inc. or Oracle Corp. buy a big-time storage vendor? Will the EMC-Dell relationship outlast IBM-NetApp? Can 3PAR solve Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co.'s storage problems? Will Symantec Corp. break up? Who will win the race to the cloud? Is this the year for solid-state storage, storage clouds, primary deduplication and/or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)? Is FalconStor Software Inc. the next Isilon Systems … or the next BakBone Software? How far can CommVault ride Simpana 9? And Will Quantum Corp. thrive or merely survive?
Read more about these data storage questions for 2011.
Additional storage news
Check out last week's storage channel news roundup.
Join the conversationComment
Share
Comments
Results
Contribute to the conversation