Traditionally, administrators have met application performance and availability requirements by allocating enough physical storage capacity to handle anticipated growth. However, this pre-allocation approach generally leads to overprovisioning storage capacity, which can in turn incur unnecessary capital costs and increased energy, space, and management costs—not to mention significant underutilization of that capacity.
To help increase storage utilization, simplify management, and avoid the excess costs associated with overprovisioning storage capacity, Dell/EMC CX4 Series storage area network (SAN) arrays offer virtual provisioning, a thin provisioning–based storage virtualization technology that enables storage capacity to be allocated simply and automatically on an as-needed basis. One of several features available in Dell/EMC CX4 Series arrays, virtual provisioning aggregates thin logical units (LUNs) into a virtualized thin pool of shared storage capacity, which is then physically allocated on demand based on application usage with no application disruption or downtime and no manual intervention required. And because Dell/EMC CX4 Series storage arrays support both virtualized and non-virtualized environments and include tools to migrate easily between the two, organizations can easily deploy both thin LUNs and traditional LUNs within an array and migrate from one to the other as requirements change.
By helping avoid the need to pre-allocate unused storage and automating key storage provisioning and management tasks, virtual provisioning can dramatically enhance utilization rates and simplify storage management—helping organizations to reduce the total cost of ownership of their storage infrastructures and enhance the energy efficiency of their data centers. Combined with the flexibility to deploy both virtualized and non-virtualized storage pools, virtual provisioning in Dell/EMC CX4 Series arrays can help organizations meet application capacity, performance, and availability requirements while controlling costs.
By Greg White, Annette Cormier, and Eric Cannell Download PDF  |
