‘Free Space’ reclamation tool for Thin Provisioning: User Forum Posts on DataCore Space Reclamation
“We’ve long shied away from putting agents on servers — people don’t like them, they’re messy. People were happier with administrators doing the reclamation. Now people are happier with thin provisioning though, so we’re releasing an automated version.”
SearchStorage UK: How to get the most from thin provisioning your storage (by Bryan Betts)
…Volkswagen Financial Services (UK) used DataCore’s SANmelody software, running on a redundant pair of storage servers, to implement a virtualised and thin-provisioned SAN. “We are certainly more efficient,” says senior network specialist Mike Duxbury. “We were wasting terabytes before.” He estimates that thin provisioning has probably saved his company 20% to 30% of its storage.
A big financial advantage with thin provisioning, adds Duxbury, is the ability to over-allocate, allocating the servers more total disk capacity than you physically own. So if you think your servers will need 10 TB each in three years time, you can give them all logical 10 TB volumes without needing to buy that much disk space right now. Extra physical capacity can be added to the SAN over time, as they actually consume it.
