Storage systems recently have been adding some very cool capabilities like thin provisioning (over allocation of storage), auto-grow capabilities to dynamically add space and de-duplication of files or blocks. These are all aimed solidly at increasing storage efficiency and when used well can have a dramatic impact. One of NetApp's newest products Provisioning Manager helps you continuously manage your storage efficiency using these technologies.
Provisioning Manager is another of our policy based management products. The storage administrator sets a policy which controls the acceptable levels of storage allocation, backup space reservation (snap reserve), auto-grow triggers and alerting. Provisioning Manager then automatically manages the storage allocation to meet this policy allowing for safe and well managed over-allocation of storage.
What is really interesting about this is the separation between user demand and management of the physical assets - I call this Demand-Asset Isolation. It involves separating the users request for storage from the actual physical storage and helps to solve one of the key problems with storage efficiency today - IT teams unwittingly over planning for future growth in their storage demands. With disks on an ever reducing in price curve, deferring longer the purchase of these assets will directly affect your bottom line.
Demand-Asset Isolation is possible today and Provisioning Manager can help you achieve it. http://media.netapp.com/documents/ds_2742_provisioningmgr.pdf
Provisioning Manager is one of the newest products of NetApp.This helped me in storing large amount of datas.
Posted by: Fitness Freak | March 17, 2009 at 03:25 AM
You have complete control and choice on the auto-provisioning. You can set the system up to alert you based on utilization versus real storage or to auto-extend - completely user configurable. If set for alerting the admin can then use provisoning manage to automate the extend. In many customer situations we have seen them deploy the more passive "alert me then I'll take action" versus the fully automated. However for some customer situations the fully automated approach may actually work well.
Posted by: Paul Turner | November 28, 2008 at 10:44 AM
This technology sounds kind of dangerous, if I understand it correctly. Are you saying it will auto-provision more space once a threshold is hit? And that this works with thin provisioning and deduplication to actually provision much more space than really exists? On a user-writable filer?
I've been burned by Oracle autoextend too much. I wouldn't turn this on except in carefully controlled circumstances!
Unless I'm totally misunderstanding you...
Stephen
Posted by: Stephen Foskett | November 24, 2008 at 06:13 AM