Why is Thin Provisioning Over 10 Years Late and What Impact Has This Had ?

I am sure you are thinking, what am I talking about, when I say:

Why is Thin Provisioning over 10 years late, and what impact has this had.

I will get to that in a minute.

As this is my first blog, I will just quickly introduce myself.

I am an enterprise storage specialist. In a later blog I will expand on what I mean by enterprise, which is a term that is probably overused and becoming harder to define with the blurring between mid-range and enterprise storage solutions.

I worked for EMC for over 9 years in the UK, with the last 4+ years as the Symmetrix presales specialist / product manager for UK&I, and 3 years prior to that at STK a technical presales role mainly selling mainframe tape and DASD solutions, and for 7 years prior to that at Lloyds Bank (a large UK retail bank) in the mainframe storage team.

I took a redundancy package from EMC back in March and have taken a few months off (mini career break) to work on a loft conversion with some builders on my house, and took the family to Orlando for a holiday in May and popped into EMC World at my expense to meet with many ex colleagues and see what EMC was publicly saying about V-Max and all their other products, and get the latest news and views in the IT and Storage space.

I have continued to follow the IT and storage industry since leaving EMC, and have read many blogs, though resisted the temptation to leave comments or blog until now. I do though have many thoughts to share, and will do so over the coming months. Thank you to those of you who have persuaded me to start blogging.

And I am now in job hunting mode, so any offers welcome ! - Sorry for the plug (advert).

Anyway back to the purpose of this blog.

What do I mean, when I say why is Thin Provisioning over 10 years late.

I assuming the reader understands the basics of Thin Provisioning. And I know HDS, EMC, IBM etc, use other terms to describe their Thin Provisioning implementations, and much has been written about Thin Provisioning over the last few years.

The major/classic enterprise storage vendors (EMC, HDS and IBM) have all only introduced Thin Provisioning capabilities for their enterprise storage solutions within the last year or two, with HDS been the first. I think is is fair to say that at the time of introduction none were production ready (for example lacking replication support), and it is only within the last year that their customers might have considered deploying Thin Provisioning in a production environment, using these vendors products.

I know 3PAR, NetApp and other vendors traditionally thought more of as mid tier players have had Thin Provisioning capability for slighlty longer. More about this in another blog.

Some of you with a mainframe background might remember the STK Iceberg or IBM RVA (RAMAC Virtual Array - OEM of the Iceberg) from the mid / late 90's. The Iceberg storage array provided Thin Provisioned storage (DASD) in an IBM mainframe OS/390 environment, as well as compression ! Though STK and IBM factored in compression when selling the Iceberg, selling it based on effective rather than raw capacity of the installed disks. And as IBM rightly described it, it was a virtual array.

As a customer I used the Iceberg (I was involved in the purchase of a total of approx 18 over a 2 year period at Lloyds). Its Thin Provisioning functionality significantly simplified the provisioning and management of the mainframe storage environment, and provided great flexibility that I will expand on sometime in a future blog.

So why was the Iceberg NOT a huge success and why did it NOT take over the world. The mid / late 90's were when EMC became dominant in the mainframe market, and whilst IBM OEM'd the Iceberg in June 1996, and gained a reasonable market share with it over the following 3 years, EMC became the No 1 player, and the STK/IBM OEM agreement came to an end in 1999/2000 when IBM introduced the Shark.

I could write much more on the Iceberg, the benefits it gave customers, and why I believe it did not continue to be a significant player in the 21st Century.

The question I am asking, is why did it take so long for EMC, HDS and IBM, who all played in the mainframe storage market in the 90's, and were fully aware of Iceberg, not see a need to develop Thin Provisioning functionality for their products back in the 90's or even the first few years of this century .

Was it because:

1) They did not understand the benefits Thin Provisioning gave customers, so did not see the need to introduce this type of functionality ?

2) They thought it meant they would sell less storage. Which in turn would mean less revenue ?

3) Large customers were not pushing for Thin Provisioning functionality, but other functionality, such as advanced remote replication ?

My personal view is that it was a mixture of all these factors and probably other factors, because even when I spoke with someone technical at EMC, who I respected back in Jan 2008, and said to them that EMC needs to provide Thin Provisioning support on Symmetrix for the IBM mainframe, they said why, and did not appreaciate the benefits it could deliver.

So what impact has the lack of thin provisioning over the last 10+ years had.

It has meant:

• Storage utilisation levels have typically remained poor at well under 50% for many years. Obviously this figure varies based on each customer environment though I am sure no one would argue utilisation levels have been poor.
• Customers have purchased far more raw storage than they would have needed if Thin Provisioning had existed. Which means capital expenditure was potentially far greater than it should have been.
• Significantly more floor space, power and cooling have been consumed, than would have been necessary. Meaning building of new data centres could have been delayed, and less CO2 would have been emitted into the atmosphere.

So the lack of Thin Provisioning has had a huge impact on capital expenditure and TCO, as well as the world's energy resources and CO2 emissions !

IF Thin Provisioning had been commonly available from even 2001, once Y2K was out of the way, it would have now become a defacto feature that customers would use without question, and have much experience of using, AND integration with Operating Systems, File System, Databases etc would have been developed, to enable Thin Provisioning to deliver its true potential.

However my experience is that the majority of customers who have purchased HDS and EMC arrays within the last year, are still only thinking about implementing Thin Provisioning. And when I have meet with, and presented to customers over the last couple of years there was a big relunctance, perhaps fear, of exploiting Thin Provisoning, and provisioning more virtual capacity than real capacity exists, for fear of running out of space, as well as concerns about performance.

However from my experience from the Iceberg product, and from storage vendors current products, provided they are sensibly implemented, with awareness of some considerations at implementation time, Thin Provisoning is a big win, both from ease of management, automatic data layout, performance optimisation, as well as the capacity/space savings with increased utilisation, which result in moneytary, power, floor space and environmental savings, and also less obvious operational benefits, such as been able to very quickly provision temporary capacity for development testing over a weekend.

I know HDS have tried to encourage customers to adopt Thin Provisioning with attractive pricing for the first few TB's, and EMC have just recently announced Thin Provisioning is FREE for all Symmetrix which supported it, which I believe is a good (if little late) strategic move to make Thin Provisoning de facto. This is something I pushed for since its GA when I was at EMC, and I know Martin (Storagebod) has been vocal on this.

My point though is that the slowness of HDS, EMC, IBM and others to deliver Thin Provisioning has had a big impact.

In the past generally it seems to be the smaller storage players that have driven true innovation, such as STK , and more recently 3PAR in this case with Thin Provisioning for Open Systems. I think/hope that might be changing as the big players listen more to customers, and a wider selection of customers.

For example EMC lead the enterprise storage market with the introduction of SSD/Flash drives in Jan 2008, though the ability to easily exploit them will not come until EMC delivers Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST). I will do another thought provoking blog on SSD/Flash drives in the near future.

I believe if storage vendors can deliver Compression and/or Deduplication, as well as features like EMC's planned FAST functionality, built on top of Thin Provisioning for primary storage, and deliver the same or better levels of availability and performance, this with really revolutionise storage over the next few years. I do believe Flash will have an important part to play in this to meet the performance demands of such a solution.

For now, all I ask is that ALL storage vendors continue to drive the development, integration and exploitation of Thin Provisioning to deliver business and environmental benefit.

I could write a whole book on the value and benefits of Thin Provisioning and why I believe the industry has been slow to develop and adopt it, but for now your thoughts and comments would be appreaciated.

 

 

 

Comments

[Paul Sudlow]

Hey Spacrc,

Hats off to you for reminding us that Thin Provisioning, as a technology, has been around for a long time! Back in the days when you had to "Vary off CHPID's" before you could take a cable out! And you could still find miles of "bus & tag" under the tiles! (I've had to work under those STK libraries back in the day!)

However, I’m not sure I fully agree with your answer to the question you pose. Comparing the OS/390 space to the current predominant compute space (which is divided between Microsoft and Open Systems Unix / Linux) only works to an extent. As you point out, the storage technology innovators of the 90's tended to be the larger companies like EMC, HDS, IBM of course (Not forgetting Digital!!) and their design criteria was always "customer-centric" innovation, so they delivered what the market demanded. I think as IT became more widely adopted by the SMB / SME space through the late 90's into the current centaury, the "Design-Criteria" began to change to match the demands of the customers, hence we saw the emergence of companies like NetApp, and later The virtualised IP Storage vendors like EqualLogic. I think the current adoption of thin provisioning has been a response to the customer demand for ever increased efficiency in their arrays, not forgetting.... that it is only in the coming months that we will start to see an implementation of the "Volume Re-thinning" capability within file systems that will allow customer to "Reclaim" back space from an array based thinly provisioned volume. When this feature hits Vsphere and W2k8 I think you will see this as a default setting in many customer deployments.

IMHO

Keep up the blogging!

Suds

[Stephen Foskett]

Welcome to the storage blogosphere! It's great to have another perspective on storage, especially someone who knows so much about EMC kit!

Thin provisioning is interesting, but it's still only a half-solution to the utilization problem we've all faced for so many years. I've been meaning to blog on this, and maybe I will thanks to your prodding, but in short, even thin provisioned arrays will be purchased vastly over-sized due to the provision/refresh cycle in enterprise shops and poor capacity forecasting. In fact, thin provisioning promises to make utilization appear much worse not much better, especially in the short run. Instead of doling out 50% of an array's usable capacity as under-used LUNs, we'll dole out 10% as full LUNs. What could go wrong?

Looking forward to this debate!
Stephen

[SPACRC (pronounced SPARK)]

Suds (Paul)
Many thanks for taking the time to leave a comment, and a good long one at that.
I am not sure I if really provided an answer, to the question I posed.
I was not trying to compare the mainframe space to the MS/Unix space, but rather question why it took so long for the established mainframe storage players to deliver Thin Provisioning to the open system space, given the STK delivered it for the mainframe, I would have expected this to have acted as a catalyst. And the financial and environmental impact this has had due to their slowness it bringing it to market.
I totally agree the SMB/SME space has totally changed the game, and the likes of NetApp, EqualLogic (sorry did not mention them in the initial blog),3PAR, Compellent and others have driven innovation and EMC, HDS and IBM have had to play feature catch up, when in fact they could have innovated given their experience from the mid 90's. I am not sure how much truth there is in it, but I have heard it said that EMC were worried about the threat of from STK Iceberg in the early 90's.
And you mention about Volume Re-thinning and space reclamation. These are the features I refer to by integration of Thin Provisoning with the O/S and File System, which will help the effective and successful deployment of Thin Provisioning, and act a a further catalyst to it become a defacto featue.
Again many thanks for you comments and I look forward to further dialogue.

[SPACRC (pronounced SPARK)]

Stephen
Many thanks for the welcome and comments.
I am not trying to say Thin Provisioning will deliver nirvana for storage.
I totally agree there is far more to driving up storage utilisation, but I believe it is a good start.
And as you point out when a new array is purchased and provisioned initially its utilisation will appear much worse.
However based on my real world experience with the STK Iceberg, and more recently with the EMC Symmetrix (and I would expect similar results with most other vendors storage arrays which support Thin Provisioning), it does drive up utilisation levels, as empty unallocated space is not reserved and is available in a pool to use by all. Perhaps I should blog some examples of my experience.
Of course there is a risk from over provisioning, but I believe this risk is very low, provided the customer implementation is appropriate and adequate monitoring is in place. At Lloyds with the Icebergs, I typically ran them at an average 80%+ utilisation, and sometimes they peaked at 90% during busy periods such as end of month/year, but there was never an occasion where an Iceberg got close to 100% utilisation. And as I mentioned Lloyds acquired 18 Icebergs over a period of a couple of years. Basically when utilisation levels were getting to high a few more were installed. So yes the overall utilisation level dropped when the new Icebergs hit the floor, but as I say on average the utilisation level was approx 80%+.
I know things are a little different in Open Systems land, but if all customers could get even to 60 or 70% then that is far better than they are doing now.