Product guide

260 EMC Ionix ControlCenter 6.1: Taking Control of Your Datacenter
About Virtual Provisioning
Virtual Provisioning can improve storage capacity utilization and simplify storage
management by presenting the application with sufficient capacity for an extended
period of time, reducing the need to frequently provision new storage and avoiding
the cost of allocated but unused storage.
Ionix ControlCenter extends the same advanced storage management capabilities to
virtually provisioned Symmetrix devices that it provides provides to other EMC arrays
and third-party storage arrays. These capabilities include: Ionix ControlCenter Console
centralized roll-up of an entire enterprise data center, storage provisioning,
performance analysis, comprehensive reporting, and overall health monitoring.
Considerations for Implementing Virtual Provisioning
Virtual Provisioning provides datacenters with capability to dynamically manage
capacity utilization, however it is important to understand what may negatively affect
the thin pool and what monitoring is needed as follows:
◆ Storage pool needs to be monitored carefully to avoid running out of space,
causing an application failure and requiring a data restore.
◆ Oversubscription must be monitored and managed as it does allow the possibility
of a host running out of available storage.
◆ Careful selection of which servers, applications, and devices are going to
effectively share the pool to avoid spindle contention between I/O-sensitive
applications.
◆ It is important to understand an application's behavior to determine the
consumed space that cannot be reclaimed. Many file systems do not efficiently
reuse the space associated with deleted files. Some databases pre-allocate
space and format it. As a result, unnecessary space is allocated in a thin pool,
reducing the capacity utilization benefits.
Therefore, when implementing Virtual Provisioning, new operational procedures need
to be established to ensure that storage is available and provisioned before a host
runs out of available storage. Ionix ControlCenter makes these tasks not only
possible, but easy.