Pillar’s approach to Thin Provisioning is different. We thin provision within a unique storage quality of service (QoS) “band” and then tie it to an application’s priority - Application-Aware Thin Provisioning. Premium applications get premium thin provisioning. File services and back office applications like archive are thin provisioned within the lower QoS bands.
No “one size fits all” like other vendor approaches. No fragmentation slowdowns like other vendor approaches.
Pillar’s Application-Aware Thin Provisioning is available for all applications tuned to maximize the performance within a single Axiom. No other thin provisioning vendor provides the ability to consolidate multiple applications in a single, multi-tenancy array while allowing administrators to assign an application-aware quality of service to each virtual volume. NAS, SAN, iSCSI - all within a single Axiom platform. Easy to scale. Easy to provision.
The Pillar Axiom’s ability to consolidate multiple storage functions into a single array has already proven to drastically drive better physical storage utilization, and at a much lower level of capital spending. Compared to an estimated industry average of 40% of capacity allocated or utilized, Pillar customers on average utilize 62% of their existing capacity and often reach over 80%. In fact, we guarantee that the Axiom will support over 80% utilization without any performance degradation. With Pillar’s Application-Aware Thin Provisioning, the best utilization rates in the industry get even better.
Pillar’s Application-Aware Thin Provisioning delivers value in the following ways:
Buy Less, Use More - Pillar’s unique approach allows administrators to assign a quality of service to each thinly provisioned volume that is optimized via storage type and access prioritization. This allows for mixed workloads on a single system and directs performance based on application importance. Each application is supported by an appropriate storage service level from within a single virtualized storage pool.
Scale Up, Cost Down - Pillar provides for easy, granular scale as physical storage is consumed without disruption or reconfiguration. This creates a more efficient storage system with lower energy and space costs. When additional storage is needed for thinly provisioned systems, Pillar automatically adds capacity to the system’s single pool of storage while maintaining the quality of service previously assigned to thinly provisioned volumes.
Simplify Management, Reduce Complexity - An intuitive provisioning tool enables the creation of each thin file system or LUN in only six clicks, including predictive performance for five levels of service before the volume is created. Administrators can provision larger LUNs at inception, with reduced management interaction needed to increase the size of the LUN or the usual application downtime.
Thin Provisioning: A Quick Primer
Storage infrastructure is one key area where data center efficiencies can be achieved. In traditional systems, storage is allocated to a particular application and the volume is “claimed” for sole use by that application. This prevents other applications or users from accessing this capacity – even if the amount allocated is never actually used.
The array may only have half its capacity physically written to, but because of the allocation, the capacity is “stranded” and cannot be leveraged in support of additional requirements. When additional requirements arise, a new storage system must be purchased to support them.
The costs associated with traditional storage management practices are significant. Many organizations purchase up to four times more storage than necessary at initial deployment, the storage allocated is grossly underutilized, and valuable administration cycles are spent managing the environment. Also, the power and floor space expense resulting from the operation of larger or additional arrays is not insignificant.
That’s the old way. Now thin provisioning is recognized in the industry as a critical approach to simplifying storage management while drastically improving capacity utilization. And with the dramatic utilization gained by thin provisioning, it gives you the ability to defer system and capacity purchases, which results in less frequent capital expenditures.
With thin provisioning, an administrator creates a LUN or file system of any size without committing all of the physical capacity at the time of creation. This reduces the amount of the physical disk necessary to support a given workload. Each user or application has what appears to be all the storage necessary for ongoing operations, but without the physical capacity locked to a particular volume. As actual used capacity grows toward the limit of physical capacity, more can be added without leaving a portion “stranded.”
Thin provisioning benefits:
Higher utilization rates in that several applications can draw upon a single pool of physical capacity.
Ease of provisioning and management with an intuitive management interface and easy “six-click” LUN deployment.
Incremental system capacity is added to the general storage pool as needed, but without being tied to a single host.
Increased capacity means reduced capital expenditures, as the need to buy new storage becomes less frequent.
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