Thin Provisioning and it's Monday and EMC are buying (again)

In the early 1990's StorageTek released Iceberg, a virtualised storage subsystem. Not only was it virtualised but it implemented compression and thin provisioning. For those who don't know, thin provisioning allows the overallocation of storage based on the fact that most disks don't use their entire allocation. Iceberg was great because the MVS operating system was well suited to this kind of storage management. An MVS disk (or volume) could only process a single I/O at any one time (although that has changed with PAVs). Iceberg allowed lots of partially filled virtual volumes, increasing the amount of parallel I/O. On Open Systems this would be a problem as there would be a lot of unused space; Iceberg only reserved the storage for files that were in use.

Thin provisioning is back again; companies like 3Par are bringing products to market that once again allow storage space to be overallocated. Is this a good thing? Well at first glance, the answer has to be yes; why waste money? After all, 10% of a $10m storage investment is still a cool million dollars. However there are some rather significant drawbacks to over-provisioning storage. Think what happens when a disk reaches 100% utilisation and can't store any more data. Any further attemps to write that device will fail. That could take down an application or perhaps a server. Hopefully growth on that one disk has been monitored and the rate of growth won't be a significant shock; either way, only users of that one device will be affected.

Now consider thin provisioning. When the underlying storage reaches 100% utilisation, then all disks carved out of that storage will receive write failures; worse still these write failures will occur on disks which don't appear to be full! Depending on the way the storage was allocated out then the impact of 100% utilisation could be widespread; if storage is accessed by multiple tiers of storage and different lines of business, then then one LOB could affect another; development allocations could affect production. It is likely that storage wouldn't be shared out in this way but the impact is obvious.

Thin provisioning can make storage savings; but it needs more careful management; I learned that 10 years ago with Iceberg.

EMC have been purchasing again; this time it's RSA Security. I can see the benefit of this; storage and security are becoming tightly linked as storage becomes the mainstay of the Enterprise. All I can say is I hope that the purchase improves the security features of ECC, Solutions Enabler and a number of other lightly protected EMC products.