Once in a while trends appear out of a murky haze of product news, industry announcements, and new companies hitting the public markets. Over the last few weeks I've seen two major themes capturing the airwaves, or maybe capturing my browser real estate as I scan through headlines. Those trends are de-duplication and thin provisioning.
I will not attempt to assign credit to any one company in fueling these trends, but there is no doubt that Data Domain's recent IPO (DDUP - Yahoo Finance) and NetApp's recent announcements on de-duplication have brought the subject to the forefront.
The other topic gaining momentum is thin provisioning. EqualLogic, HDS and Pillar recently made announcements in this regard. There has been a lot of debate about who was "first" with thin provisioning, and a search on Google News will dig this up. Personally, I credit 3PAR with coining and promoting the term, separate from whether anyone else had that functionality embedded in their products.
Now, the common thread I see linking these two themes is the desire for customers to reduce their storage footprint, or more specifically to reduce the number of drives they buy and maintain. Gear6 spotted this trend early on and wrote about it in our post Drive Reduction.
Slowly but surely, we're approaching the end of an era where disks were considered the cheap and the easy solution to solving storage problems. This former antidote no longer holds credibility with users facing dramatically low storage utilization rates and escalating power, space, and cooling concerns.
In addition to de-duplication and thin provisioning furthering drive reduction, Gear6 sees yet another angle with customers looking to performance based caching as a way to increase IOPS and throughput without simply deploying excess disk spindles. While the forces behind de-duplication, thin provisioning, and performance caching are unique, a closer look reveals the common directions behind the initiatives.
I don't believe customers really care if they have 2 copies of a piece of data on their drives. But they do care if those extra copies are costing them money in space, power, cooling, and management to keep them around. The same goes for thin provisioning, and performance caching. In an era where disks were cheap and the operating costs to maintain them were nothing to worry about, why change? But the dynamics have shifted, and the end of an antidote has arrived.
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