Traditional storage management introduces a lot of waste. You may leave anywhere from 30% to 50% of your allocated space unused. That's why Thin Provisioning technology is so popular now.

However, not all Thin Provisioning implementations are created equal. Based on virtualized foundation and technology, Infortrend Thin Provisioning enables you to purchase only the disk capacity you actually need, no up-front capacity allocation, no more dedicating resources for each application, no more paying to power, house, and cool disks you may not need for months or years to come, or may never actually need.

  • Overview
  • Benefits

The traditional way of provisioning creates many large and underutilized data volumes in IT environments. To delay the hassles of scaling, IT managers tend to allocate for applications the data volumes much larger than they currently need. The allocated but unused capacity leads to much wasted expenses on space, power and cooling.

Infortrend's Thin Provisioning, based on virtualized foundation, frees upfront capacity planning and allocation from physical limitations. Expecting future growth, IT managers can present to servers the capacity significantly lager than the physical storage. The pooled capacity is dynamically allocated when data writes occur. Once the remaining free space reaches user-configured thresholds, system will issue notifications. Users can then expand the storage pool on-the-fly, and the added capacity will be automatically leveraged by applications. The whole expansion process is non-disruptive to the online service.

The comparison of Infortrend's space-intelligent Thin Provisioning

The Differences Infortrend's Thin Provisioning Makes:

IT Problems With Infortrend Thin Provisioning
Waste power, cooling and space expenses on unused disk space Achieve more than 80% of capacity utilization
Plan system downtime to expand data volumes Data volumes dynamically grow with data writes
Over-purchase capacity to prepare for future needs and therefore create wastes Allocate capacity freely for future growth and add disk space incrementally later as needed
Spend management efforts planning, provisioning, tracking and expanding data volumes Minimize manual intervention required to ensure continuous support of data volumes for production
Perform forklift upgrade when required capacity exceeds system limit Add additional systems or disk enclosures to scale virtualized foundation while protecting current investment

Infortrend's Thin Provisioning can bring you:

Reduced Costs

Improves storage capacity utilization. Users can add disk space as needed and delay storage purchases to leverage disk drive price declines.

Simplified Management

Eases capacity planning and volume utilization tracking. After initial provisioning, volumes will automatically grow to accommodate new writes and IT managers only need to ensure there is enough free space in the storage pool.

Increased Availability

Eliminates capacity expansion downtime. Both data volumes and storage can be expanded without disrupting business production.