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3PAR Thin Provisioning Software
Since its introduction, 3PAR® Thin Provisioning software has become widely considered the gold standard in thin provisioning, helping customers minimize up-front capacity purchases by an average of 60% and meet Green IT targets.
3PAR Thin Provisioning and next-gen thin technologies also produce dramatic efficiency gains that cut SAN costs, floor space requirements, and energy expenses by up to 75% and decrease administration time by 90%.
Studies show that organizations typically accept storage capacity utilization rates of 25% or less. 3PAR Thin Provisioning applies dedicate-on-write technology to eliminate this waste by allowing you to purchase only the disk capacity you actually need, only as you actually need it. No more up-front capacity allocation. No more dedicating resources for each application. No more paying to power, house, and cool disks you don’t need today and may never actually need.
Other storage vendors claim to offer capacity reduction products, but not all thin implementations are created equal, and they certainly don’t offer equal benefits.
3PAR Thin Provisioning
3PAR Thin Provisioning is completely automated—so you can just “set it and forget it”. Capacity is dedicated and configured autonomically, just-in-time, and without active management. No more planning and configuring storage into intermediary pools, and no more compensating for unnecessary inefficiencies.
Reservationless vs. pre-dedicated pools. 3PAR uses a reservationless, dedicate-on-write approach to thin provisioning that draws and configures capacity in fine-grained increments from a single free space reservoir without pre-dedication of any kind. Other vendors claim to offer thin provisioning but actually require separate pre-dedicated pools for each data service level. These pools are actually silos of allocated-but-unused capacity that can require manual setup, provisioning, and management that impacts thin provisioning ROI and flexibility.
Fine-grained vs. coarse allocation unit size. 3PAR Thin Provisioning uses a dedication unit size of just 16 KB, so you don’t have to worry about small writes consuming megabytes of capacity. Other vendors use coarse dedication unit sizes of 1 MB to 17 GB—sixty to a million times larger than 3PAR. This coarse allocation unit size can cause many volumes to fill up during file system setup, even before the first bit of data is ever written.
Clustered vs. dual-controller architecture. 3PAR is the only vendor to feature the clustered 3PAR InSpire® Architecture, which uniquely supports thin provisioning by providing the optimal platform for storage consolidation and massive scalability within a single system.
Built-in vs. bolt-on virtualization. 3PAR is the only vendor with arrays built from the ground-up to support thin provisioning by eliminating the diminished performance and functional limitations that plague bolt-on thin solutions. 3PAR is also the first storage vendor to incorporate thin processing into array hardware with the introduction of the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC and our unique Thin Built In™ hardware design.
3PAR Thin Technologies (PDF)
Wikibon Case Study: Evaluating the Virtualization and Thin Provisioning Benefits Achieved by 3PAR Customers (Website)
Illuminata Report: Making the Thin Provisioning Connection (PDF)
