NetApp Thin Provisioning – Doing More with Less

Reducing or deferring a datacenter’s capital and/or operational expense has become a paramount concern in today’s challenging economic climate. Many storage vendors’ promote functionality and features that can purportedly provide potential cost savings but few actually deliver on this promise. However, one proven feature offered in the open system marketplace since the early 2000’s is thin provisioning. This storage feature can readily provide immediate and ongoing capital and operational expense savings. The potential cost savings of this feature are significant and are being more and more recognized. Indeed, as can be seen in Figure 1 below from the TheInfoPro (TIP) Wave 13 survey of storage professionals and CIOs, thin provisioning has emerged as the second most important virtualization functionality for storage systems. Consequently, thin provisioning will have a prominent place in storage system deployments over the near future. More…

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