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Home > Products > Software > Thin Provisioning

3PAR Thin Provisioning

3PAR^® Thin Provisioning is dedicate-on-write software technology that allows you to purchase only the disk capacity you actually need.

3PAR Thin Provisioning continues to set the industry standard against which all other “thin” approaches are measured. 

But not all thin provisioning implementations are created equal, and they certainly don’t offer equal benefits. 3PAR Thin Provisioning is the most comprehensive thin provisioning software solution available. It enables 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 may not need for months or years to come, or may never actually need. To understand how other “thin provisioning” solutions measure up to 3PAR Thin Provisioning, consider the five most crucial criteria for any thin provisioning deployment:

Built-in vs. bolt-on virtualization. When thin provisioning is an afterthought rather than a design goal, you can expect diminished performance and functional limitations. These tradeoffs include the inability to replicate thin provisioned volumes in thin or snapshot form, the inability to thinly provision all available physical capacity, inadequate reporting capabilities, and unnecessary administrative burden. 3PAR offers the only arrays built from the ground-up to support thin provisioning and eliminate these tradeoffs. 3PAR is also the first storage vendor in the industry to incorporate thin processing into array hardware with the new InServ^® F-Class and T-Class arrays.
 
Clustered vs. dual-controller architectures. Thin provisioning is really just about making capacity promises that may have to be kept in the future. For this reason, the scalability of your storage arrays is critical to ability to meet these promises and to achieving a truly thin environment. Dual-controller architectures are disadvantaged in this respect. Only highly scalable designs, such as the clustered 3PAR InSpire^® Architecture, are optimal for thin provisioning since they are purpose-built for storage consolidation and massive growth within a single system. With the introduction of the InServ F-Class, 3PAR is the first and only storage vendor to offer a quad-controller, midrange array that supports 3PAR Thin Provisioning and all the other advanced features that set the InServ family apart from traditional storage arrays.
 
Reservationless vs. reservation-based provisioning. 3PAR uses a reservationless, dedicate-on-write approach where capacity is drawn and configured in fine-grained increments from a single free space buffer without pre-dedication of any kind. Other vendors claim to offer thin provisioning but actually require separate thin provisioning 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.
 
Autonomic vs. manual provisioning. Similarly, some thin provisioning products require administrators to manually add capacity to these silos in order to grow “thin” volumes, which ultimately defeats the purpose of thin provisioning. 3PAR’s approach is completely automated—so can you just set it and forget it. Capacity is dedicated and configured naturally, just-in-time, and without active management. No more planning and configuring your storage, and no more compensating for unnecessary inefficiencies!
 
Fine-grained vs. coarse allocation unit size. How much capacity needs to be dedicated as writes occur? Where the unit of capacity dedication is much greater than the size of the write, the efficiencies of thin provisioning are diminished, and can even be lost altogether. For maximum efficiency, the basic unit of capacity dedication for thin provisioning volume writes should be minimal—otherwise you’re just wasting space each time you write data. 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 up to 42 MB.