How do you reduce SAN costs with thin provisioning and deduplication?

1 What is thin provisioning?

Thin provisioning is a method of allocating storage space to servers and applications on demand, rather than pre-allocating a fixed amount of space for each volume. This allows you to use less physical storage capacity and avoid over-provisioning or under-utilizing your storage resources. Thin provisioning also simplifies storage management, as you do not need to monitor and resize volumes manually, and you can easily adjust the storage allocation as your needs change. Thin provisioning can reduce your SAN costs by lowering your initial investment, saving on power and cooling, and extending the lifespan of your storage devices.

2 What is deduplication?

Deduplication is a process of eliminating redundant or duplicate data blocks from your storage system, and storing only unique data blocks. Deduplication can reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored, transferred, and backed up, and improve the performance and efficiency of your storage system. Deduplication can also reduce your SAN costs by freeing up storage space, reducing bandwidth consumption, and lowering backup and recovery time and costs.

3 How do you implement thin provisioning and deduplication?

Different vendors, device types and configurations can have an effect on the implementation of thin provisioning and deduplication in SANs. Hardware-based thin provisioning and deduplication are built into storage devices or controllers, and are usually faster and more transparent, but require specific hardware compatibility. Software-based approaches are provided by the operating system, hypervisor, or application, and usually offer more flexibility but introduce more overhead. Hybrid thin provisioning and deduplication combines hardware and software approaches to offer the best of both worlds, but may require more coordination and integration.

4 What are the benefits of thin provisioning and deduplication?

Thin provisioning and deduplication can offer several benefits for your SAN, such as improved storage utilization and efficiency, reduced storage costs, enhanced storage performance and availability, and simplified storage management. You can use less physical storage capacity to store more data, achieve higher storage density and consolidation, save on capital and operational expenses, reduce the I/O load and latency on your storage devices, increase the throughput and responsiveness of your storage system, improve the reliability and recoverability of your data, reduce the risk of data loss or corruption, automate and streamline the storage provisioning and allocation process, reduce manual intervention and human errors, and adapt to changing storage demands and requirements more quickly.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?