DISQUS

Dave,

I'm flattered. What - you want to have a con call?

Hey Stephen, good post! The hype today has been way out of whack.

Excellent post Stephen! BUT I think saying thin provisioning is a "lie", could be easily misunderstood. There is no question that you should NOT USE THIN PROVISIONING FOR END USER STORAGE, but that doesn't mean that it can't be amazingly effective and not at all dangerous for many other uses. For example, VMFS, is extremely thin friendly and becoming more so all the time.

Marc Farley here. The previous comment was mine. I expected the authentication/registration system to recognize me as I had signed in using my email address at 3PAR. Perhaps you can address this Stephen? Its more cumbersome commenting on your site than Barry Whyte's - and THAT is saying something.

So here we have the usual discussion about doing something today or waiting for a standard to emerge at some unknown point in the future. Standards, like SMI-S have not necessarily lived up to expectations - should we repeat the process for thin provisioning and expect the results to be better? A recent discussion on SMI-S might be worth a look:
http://dcsblog.burtongroup.com/data_center_stra...

The way I understand it, the Symantec implementation requires an "aware" thin provisioning storage target in order to avoid the problems Anarchist raises. FWIW, I'm not sure how awareness is specified or communicated with Symantec's API.

In the desire to be perfect and all encompassing, nobody benefits.

That said, Anarchist's employer EMC has been very loyal to standards efforts in storage management and I think they deserve credit for their commitment. Unfortunately, herding storage cats has proven to be less than wonderfully effective.

Yes, 1 TB SATA drives help, but you have to start with a large number of them (180, I believe) and you have to use mirroring, and that's where my "anti-green" comment came from.

Wide striping is good and I suspect XIV will have decent streaming performance, but their distributed cache connectivity is 10GB Ethernet (I believe, again) which has great bandwidth characteristics, but relatively weak latency characteristics, which will likely impact transaction processing capabilities.

So, I'm from 3PAR and of course any product that a customer could purchase instead of ours is a concern to me. The reaction from EMC probably comes from a couple places: their competitive culture and wanting to stomp on the perception that the company is still running on Moshe's fumes. BTW, I like your question Steve. Hulk and Maui appear to be a large distributed file system type of product with content management built in.

But not exactly very green.

Hi Stephen, Marc Farley from 3PAR here. Thanks for the love and yes we are making steps in the right direction. I agree that thin provisioning is still in the up and coming phase of it's technology life cycle.

As for the interacting with the other parts of the storage ecosystem, I think you'll see progress made along those lines in the not too distant future. Otherwise, Thin Provisioning is a terrific purpose-based technology. Its not the optimal solution for user-exposed storage as you wrote, but it is extremely useful for line of business applications and back end application processes where "wild end user behavior" is minimal. These are environments where data creation and growth are more systematic. I don't know why people wouldn't want to use it for those scenarios.