Organizations continually search for ways to both simplify storage management processes and improve storage capacity utilization. Several products have been released over the past few years that promise efficient use of storage space. One of the technologies that is quickly catching up is thin provisioning. 3PAR was one of the first vendors to introduce the concept while the rest quickly followed the suite.
When provisioning storage for a new application, administrators must consider that application’s future capacity requirements rather than simply its current requirements. In order to reduce the risk that storage capacity will be exhausted, disrupting application and business processes, organizations often have allocated more physical storage to an application than is needed for a significant amount of time. This allocated but unused storage introduces operational costs. Even with the most careful planning, it often is necessary to provision additional storage in the future, which could potentially require an application outage.
EMC Virtual Provisioning: - introduced with Enginuity 5773, addresses some of these challenges. It builds on the base “thin provisioning” functionality, which is the ability to have a large “thin” device (volume) configured and presented to the host while consuming physical storage from a shared pool only as needed. Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning can improve storage capacity utilization and simplify storage management by presenting the application with sufficient capacity for an extended period of time, reducing the need to provision new storage frequently and avoiding costly allocated but unused storage. Symmetrix Management Console and the command line interface (CLI) are the primary management and monitoring tools.
When provisioning storage for a new application, administrators must consider that application’s future capacity requirements rather than simply its current requirements. In order to reduce the risk that storage capacity will be exhausted, disrupting application and business processes, organizations often have allocated more physical storage to an application than is needed for a significant amount of time. This allocated but unused storage introduces operational costs. Even with the most careful planning, it often is necessary to provision additional storage in the future, which could potentially require an application outage.
EMC Virtual Provisioning: - introduced with Enginuity 5773, addresses some of these challenges. It builds on the base “thin provisioning” functionality, which is the ability to have a large “thin” device (volume) configured and presented to the host while consuming physical storage from a shared pool only as needed. Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning can improve storage capacity utilization and simplify storage management by presenting the application with sufficient capacity for an extended period of time, reducing the need to provision new storage frequently and avoiding costly allocated but unused storage. Symmetrix Management Console and the command line interface (CLI) are the primary management and monitoring tools.
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning: - introduces a new type of host accessible device called a “thin device” that can be used in the same way that a regular device has traditionally been used. Unlike regular Symmetrix devices, thin devices do not need to have physical storage completely allocated at the time the devices are presented to a host. The physical storage that is used to supply disk space for a thin device comes from a shared thin storage pool that has been associated with the thin device. A thin storage pool is comprised of a new type of internal Symmetrix device called a data device that is dedicated to the purpose of providing the actual physical storage used by thin devices. When they are first created, thin devices are not associated with any particular thin pool. An operation referred to as “binding” must be performed to associate a thin device with a thin pool.
When a write is performed to a portion of the thin device, the Symmetrix allocates a minimum allotment of physical storage from the pool and maps that storage to a region of the thin device. The storage allocation operations are performed in small units of storage called “thin device extents.” A round-robin mechanism is used to balance the allocation of data device extents across all of the data devices in the pool that are enabled and that have remaining unused capacity. The thin device extent size is 12 tracks (768 KB). That means that the initial bind of a thin device to a pool causes one thin device extent, or 12 tracks, to be allocated per thin device. So a four-member thin meta would cause 48 tracks (3078 KB) to be allocated when the device is bound to a thin pool.
When a read is performed on a thin device, the data being read is retrieved from the appropriate data device in the storage pool to which the thin device is bound. When more storage is required to service existing or future thin devices, data devices can be added to existing thin storage pools. New thin devices can also be created and associated with existing thin pools.
It is possible for a thin device to be presented for host-use before all of the reported capacity of the device has been mapped. It is also possible for the sum of the reported capacities of the thin devices using a given pool to exceed the available storage capacity of the pool. Such a thin device configuration is said to be oversubscribed.
The storage is allocated from the pool using a round-robin approach that tends to stripe the data devices in the pool. Storage Admin should keep in mind that when implementing Virtual Provisioning, it is important that realistic utilization objectives are set. Generally, organizations should target no higher than 60 percent to 80 percent capacity utilization per pool. A buffer should be provided for unexpected growth or a “runaway” application that consumes more physical capacity than was originally
When a write is performed to a portion of the thin device, the Symmetrix allocates a minimum allotment of physical storage from the pool and maps that storage to a region of the thin device. The storage allocation operations are performed in small units of storage called “thin device extents.” A round-robin mechanism is used to balance the allocation of data device extents across all of the data devices in the pool that are enabled and that have remaining unused capacity. The thin device extent size is 12 tracks (768 KB). That means that the initial bind of a thin device to a pool causes one thin device extent, or 12 tracks, to be allocated per thin device. So a four-member thin meta would cause 48 tracks (3078 KB) to be allocated when the device is bound to a thin pool.
When a read is performed on a thin device, the data being read is retrieved from the appropriate data device in the storage pool to which the thin device is bound. When more storage is required to service existing or future thin devices, data devices can be added to existing thin storage pools. New thin devices can also be created and associated with existing thin pools.
It is possible for a thin device to be presented for host-use before all of the reported capacity of the device has been mapped. It is also possible for the sum of the reported capacities of the thin devices using a given pool to exceed the available storage capacity of the pool. Such a thin device configuration is said to be oversubscribed.
The storage is allocated from the pool using a round-robin approach that tends to stripe the data devices in the pool. Storage Admin should keep in mind that when implementing Virtual Provisioning, it is important that realistic utilization objectives are set. Generally, organizations should target no higher than 60 percent to 80 percent capacity utilization per pool. A buffer should be provided for unexpected growth or a “runaway” application that consumes more physical capacity than was originally
Benefits of Virtual Provisioning :
Less expensive to pre-provision storage
In case one needs to preprovision storage, the entire amount of physical storage has to be configured and dedicated at the time of pre provision.
But in case of thin luns, one can exceed the amount of physical storage during provisioning. Also with time, as costs of physical storage drops consistently, it could save dollars.
Easy implementation of wide stripes
A configured thin pool ensures that a thin device will be widely stripped across the backend in 768K extends. Thus a single thin device requires no planning on part of administrator.
Performance
The performance for certain random IO workloads can be improved due to the fact that thin devices are widely stripped across the backend. Typically in a thin device implementation there is a modest response time overhead incurred the first time a write is performed on an unallocated region of a thin device. This overhead tends to disappear once the working set of thin device has been written to.
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