Re: Thin provisioning & arrays

jim owens
2008-11-11T23:52:08Z

Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 09:55:59AM -0500, jim owens wrote:
>> Ric Wheeler wrote:
>>> Thing is being pitched to answer a very specific customer use case -
>>> shared storage (mid to high end almost exclusively) with several
>>> different users and applications....
> ...
>> It is up to the customer to manage their storage so it never
>> reaches the unable-to-write state.
>
> Sure, but putting the entire management burden of obtaining and
> running defrag tools in every one of their large set of OS's is the
> wrong approach.
>
> We can and should be designing new functionality for the data center
> in such a manner that does not require large scale manual
> intervention to maintain the systems. Your customers won't thank you
> for solving the thin provisioning management problem by requiring
> them to do extra hand-holding....

I agree that it could be done better.

I just don't expect that to happen any time soon because
both multiple array vendors and multiple OS vendors must
agree and spend money when they don't see this as a large
amount of missed opportunity money. You only have to be
as good as your competition and the customers are used to
doing the extra hand-holding.

All we can do is support what the devices will do today
with minimal effort and wait for customer demand to force
everyone to make improvements.

jim