'Lean provisioning' as must-have

At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Wash., “lean provisioning” has turned into a virtualization must-have, said Daryl Anderson, portfolio manager for application and data hosting/housing at the lab, in a recent interview. Lean provisioning is similar to thin provisioning, an increasingly popular feature of storage virtualization that allows automated resource provisioning across a storage area network. This U.S. Department of Energy lab has been using lean provisioning, its own version of thin provisioning made possible by the LSI storage appliance it uses, for more than a half a dozen years. While this process is more manual than today’s thin provisioning, PNNL is still realizing savings, Anderson says. “We give our customers just the amount of storage they need, and then they can come back and ask for more and we can grow it for them” rather than wasting space set aside for projected growth, he says. Other critical capabilities include the ability to copy and/or migrate data from one place to another – live, with no server downtime – and snapshots, for quick recovery from system corruptions. Additionally, Anderson says, the appliance allows PNNL to remain vendor agnostic on the storage side because it supports heterogeneous environments. Overall, he says, “storage virtualization nowadays is a pretty critical part of being able to manage large amounts of storage while maintaining flexibility, reliability and experience cost savings.” PNNL, for example, supports today’s 80TB of virtualized storage with the same number of system engineers – essentially one and a half – as it did when the lab brought in the storage appliance and had only 2.6TB of virtualized storage.