Originating Author: David Vellante
An emerging set of suppliers is gaining recognition in the market for simplifying and automating the provisioning and management of storage. Leaders in this space include 3PAR, EqualLogic, NetApp and others. The industry has reached a critical tipping point where such storage systems can provision and manage storage more effectively and efficiently than storage administrators.
3PAR was the first to market with a thin provisioning solution and has set the standard for simplicity. The company has led the charge to automation with its highly virtualized storage architecture and thin provisioning. Research within the Wikibon user community suggests that the cost-efficiencies, flexibility, and management benefits of such systems are well established and best-of-breed. IT organizations experiencing high rates of change and data growth should consider approaches such as 3PAR’s to improve quality-of-storage-service and efficiencies in the data center.
Action Item: In all but the highest performance applications, storage executives should look to utilize emerging architectures to simplify and automate performance and storage management. Gaining experience with such systems will allow IT operations to improve efficiency, reliability and end customer satisfaction.
