Battle of the bulge

27.03.2006
Thin-provisioning applications are among the latest weapons in the battle of the bloated storage budget. Several vendors are now pushing these optional features of familiar storage systems as a way for corporate IT officials to send a powerful message to storage-hungry business units: Finish what's on your plate before going back for seconds.

The back-and-forth between IT officials and users has become an all-too-familiar exchange. "It has almost become a ritual," notes Ernest Wurzbach, director of portal operations at Oakland, California-based Ask.com. "Those of us responsible for managing storage and storage budgets know how much allocated space winds up being attached to products or applications but never gets used."

Waste not, want not

Unused capacity is a natural byproduct of traditional storage-allocation methods, says Tony Asaro, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Massachusetts.

"Normally, if I want to provision a certain amount of capacity for a certain project, I must allocate that much capacity. Say it is 1TB. In reality, the user will probably only need about one-tenth of that space immediately, but I've had to allocate the whole terabyte," Asaro explains. "So the other 900GB cannot be used. There is no access to it. Now, if I do this for every application, I will quickly have a storage system that is 100 percent allocated but not fully utilized."

That's exactly the situation Ask.com wanted to avoid. Rather than letting a lot of storage capacity earmarked for specific users or business units go untouched for long periods, the information-retrieval giant wanted to immediately use every scrap of capacity available upon the purchase of a single storage architecture for its Excite, iWon and My Way brands.