As the January 2011 issue of CIO Digest noted, a recent Gartner survey revealed data growth was the most cited IT concern for 2011 by large enterprises. One option to reduce disk storage growth is Thin Provisioning. Thin Provisioning allocates storage as needed, yet stays completely transparent to applications. In effect, it finally brings the advantages of just-in-time inventory, pioneered by Japanese Manufacturers in the 1980s, to data centers.

But are enterprises adopting Thin Provisioning?

Figure 1 shows data from the Symantec Operations Readiness Tools website.

Figure 1: Thin Provisioning Adoption

Takeaways

• Lots of Storage is already Thin Capable
• Increasingly, Thin Provisioning is actually created and deployed (LUNs). It is not just an available but unused feature