Thin provisioning addresses the basic pain point of unused and wasted capacity and, for many, enables a fundamental benefit of shared storage — using only what you need and having more available for growth.

Selling thin provisioning products is a good play for VARs because it’s a disruptive technology. It can get you into a disk discussion with a customer where you’re currently not selling disk. Since the overallocation percentages are so high, (50% is not uncommon), thin provisioning makes for a compelling topic and gives you a chance to show your value to a new account. 

There are several good thin provisioning disk vendors that you can go to bat with against an incumbent disk supplier. Two of the leaders are 3PAR and Isilon. While many of the traditional storage vendors are also offering some form of thin provisioning these days, they’re somewhat late to the game and have a feature set that’s a little — forgive the pun — thin. If you’re interested in selling thin provisioning capabilities from the traditional guys, check to see if they have the ability to reclaim space from deleted files (and stay thin) or how they support the CPU overhead of the thin provisioning process. These details are covered in our article “Keep Thin Provisioning Thin.” 

Products from the likes of 3PAR and Isilon have plenty of things that differentiate them from a traditional “hard-provisioned” disk array or even one that claims to also do thin provisioning. As they say, “The devil’s in the details.” You’re in a good position to unseat an existing disk array vendor by looking into thin provisioning and talking about these details with your customers.

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That said, bringing new products in the door for your customers can be a big part of your value as a value-added reseller. With that in mind, I’m going to launch a new series of blog posts titled “Tech Refresh,” in which I’ll focus on a technology that you may not be selling but that you should probably consider. I’ll present an overview of the technology, the problems it solves, why it has some appeal for VARs and then list a few manufacturers that have products in that space. Here’s the first Tech Refresh.  

Thin provisioning: “Just in time” storage

Provisioning refers to the practice of physically allocating storage to a server running an application or hosting a file system, which it consumes (or writes to) as its data set grows. For example, in a SAN environment, the combined capacity of the array(s) involved would be cut up to provision the servers connected to the SAN. Storage growth would be supported by provisioning additional capacity from the consolidated SAN arrays as applications required it.

For some operating systems and applications, like databases, storage capacity expansion can be disruptive and time-consuming, requiring extra space and migration of the entire data set. The alternative and, unfortunately, the most common practice is to allocate more storage than these applications need, up front, and eliminate the expansion process down the road. Even though this “solution” is expensive, it’s not unusual for 50% or more of current storage capacity in an organization to be overallocated.

Thin provisioning, as discussed in our article “Thin Provisioning Basics,” is a storage software technology that presents a larger “virtual allocation” to the application, but only physically allocates (or provisions) capacity when the data’s actually written. The result is that these applications can be set up with plenty of capacity (virtually) allocated to them but only provisioned as that space is needed. It’s a “just in time” process for storage. The benefits are obviously cost savings but also reduced complexity and disruption typically associated with storage growth in arrays traditionally provisioned.