Advanced Disk Efficiency: Now Is The Time to Turn It On

[#1]

As you may have seen in recent news reports, the growth in storage demand and disruptions at some manufacturing facilities have resulted in shortages of some hard disk drives.   HP’s world class supply chain gives us advantages in this environment.  But IT managers should look at how they can mitigate any potential risk they may have on timing of availability of additional disk drive capacity.

What Can You Do? 

For HP customers that have recently acquired new HP 3PAR or LeftHand storage systems, there is a lot you can do.  These systems come with a lot of new technology on board that can make a difference.  The best known of these capabilities are 3PAR Thin Provisioning, Thin Conversion, Thin Reclamation and  Thin Persistence, but these are the tip of the iceberg.  If you simply operationalize all of the capabilities you already have on your 3PAR system, you may reduce the amount of disk you need by 50-60%.  Then you may not need to buy more disk drives for quite a long period of time.

We find that some customers do not take advantage of everything these systems can do right away.  A few years ago, it was common for many IT managers to take a “wait-and-see” attitude on implementing thin provisioning because it was new, and some of the other thin provisioning technologies in the market did not work very well.  But that kind of thinking does not make sense anymore.  The 3PAR Thin technologies are so well proven and have such a huge economic impact that not turning them on may be simply throwing money away.  The best thing you can do right now is put this technology to work.  If you need help, contact your local account management team.

[#2]

As someone who has been using 3PAR TP  (every time I see that I can't help but think of beavis and butthead) for almost 5 years now, if your still not sure about TP you can always fence it with LVM of some kind. I still run LVM on all of my raw (non VMFS) volumes whether or not they are TP. Mainly to prevent "accidential" growth of the file system to absurd levels. I set a reasonable logical volume size and grow the file system on demand when the time comes. Another use for LVM for me is to make identification of the volumes easier when moving snapshots around.