62% of Companies Use Thin Provisioning

This article has been written by Peter White, Storage Fusion Ltd‘s operations director.
 
Storage Fusion has analysed over 1.3EB of storage across more than 3,000 arrays.

Here it makes a small subset available from 169,355TB of data over 1,084 arrays from 36 companies analysed between January 1 2012 to December 31 2012.

62% of companies use thin provisioning suggesting that there is a general increase in the adoption of this technology.

There are probably a few reasons for this. More vendors are now supporting thin provisioning technologies. And confidence has grown; after all nobody likes to be first to run a new technology in a production environment. Added to that, storage teams remain under pressure to optimise the storage environment and make savings – thin provisioning in most cases is a no brainer.
 
However only 12.25% of companies oversubscribe on thin provisioning which means there appears to be a general reluctance to over-provision. This suggests that the original business case of investing in thin provisioning technologies isn’t yet providing the projected ROI.
 
If they are not over-provisioning they are not utilising the technology in the way that was originally intended. Thin provisioning is just like a bank as it makes you think that it has more than physically exists: for storage it’s capacity and for a bank it’s cash. The problem occurs if everyone decides to use or withdraw the full amount. When this happens in the storage world capacity is exceeded and applications crash. For a bank you see long queues of people panicking that they will never see their hard earned cash again; remember Northern Rock? If someone put together a business case justifying the investment of thin provisioning technologies but they are not over-provisioning then nothing has changed. So the ROI is zero.
 
On average 1.5% of reclaimable storage is discovered. For example, this could be a server that is no longer attached to the SAN or an old snap copy which is consuming space. In some large enterprise environments Storage Fusion analyze on average discovers 5% of reclaimable storage, meaning significant savings can be made if this is reclaimed and repurposed. The fact that any reclaimable storage exists can quite often identify inefficiencies in decommission processes and that silos exist between the server, applications and storage teams.
 
Of the 36 companies analysed EMC was the top vendor for reclaimable storage.
 
Disk ratio: solid state disks 0.2%, enterprise 38.94% and nearline 58.35%. We are seeing a gradual adoption of solid state disks but where these tend to be used with automated tiering technologies. End users are getting smarter with their data positioning ensuring that it’s in the right place at the right time for the right price.
 
Average headroom is running at 25% indicating that end users are either cautious about running out of storage or they just don’t know how much headroom they really have.
 
Average 3.3% system losses were revealed which means even before the storage admin can provision any storage the vendor has taken something away.