10
Developments in Storage Management:
Thin Provisioning, CDP et al
YSIS
Must-haves or fashion-fads?
ANAL
By Tony Lock, Programme Director at Freeform Dynamics.
There are few areas of IT that Moving on, research we solution. Essentially, thin
Y are developing quite so carried out last year indicated provisioning is about
rapidly as those concerned that some of the new data provisioning space to storage
with the management and management solutions are systems as and when the
daily administration of indeed being deployed. system actually needs to
INDUSTR
storage systems and data. Results indicated that several consume the space.
Until very recently these areas of the storage management
have been regarded as technologies that have come Traditionally, IT systems
“boring” or at best to the fore in recent years are provision all of the storage
“somewhat unexciting”. But growing in importance, space that was expected to be
developments over the especially in D2D backups, required over the system’s
last year or two have thrust CDP and data replication entire lifetime at system set
Thin Provisioning, Continuous solutions. It should also be up. Put another way, all the
Data Protection (CDP), Disk noted that high speed tape storage needed is bought up
to Disk backup (D2D), backup continues to have a front and made available right
Data de-duplication and significant role to play in data from the start.
Archiving almost onto the protection.
front pages. In some scenarios this could
So what of the storage mean that a platform is built
Does the fact that so much approach known as “thin that initially only consumes a
marketing budget has been provisioning”? Finding a few hundred gigabytes of
lavished on some of these consistent explanation of it is space but because of the
solutions mean that they are quite difficult because the uncertainties concerning
ready for the mainstream and, term is now used to describe future usage of the system,
more importantly, being a number of similar but administrators chose to buy
actively deployed? slightly different types of and allocate a lot more
A quick glance at the figure
below based on research
carried out by Freeform
Dynamics highlights that
organisations strongly
acknowledge that they have
challenges looking after the
business information they
hold. As can be seen in figure
1, a wide range of issues are
acknowledged and many of
them can be attributed to
storage management and
administration challenges.
SEPT 09 WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK
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