I came across this article from NetApp on thin provisioning and found it very interesting. Growth in storage is a fact of life and the businesses today have to just learn to deal with them. Thin provisioning promises to increase capacity utilization and bring down the Total Cost of Ownership. NetApp has this great concept of FlexVol as part of ONTAP 7G which lets you allocate storage as you need it, a JIT (Just In Time) implementation for the storage world. The FlexVol virtualizes the underlying physical storage helping the administrator add capacities on demand.
If thin provisioning is so cool, is the NetApp the only vendor? Hardly. IBM has a similar product called SAN Volume Controller. Hitachi Data Systems has the TagmaStore product, EMC has Invista virtualization platform. This is a nice article documenting the birth of Invista and the challenges EMC faced with it.

>I came across this article from NetApp on thin provisioning and found it very interesting. Growth in storage is a fact of life and the businesses today have to just learn to deal with them. Thin provisioning promises to increase capacity utilization and bring down the Total Cost of Ownership. NetApp has this great concept of FlexVol as part of ONTAP 7G which lets you allocate storage as you need it, a JIT (Just In Time) implementation for the storage world. The FlexVol virtualizes the underlying physical storage helping the administrator add capacities on demand.
If thin provisioning is so cool, is the NetApp the only vendor? Hardly. IBM has a similar product called SAN Volume Controller. Hitachi Data Systems has the TagmaStore product, EMC has Invista virtualization platform. This is a nice article documenting the birth of Invista and the challenges EMC faced with it.