Are there any alternatives to thin provisioning for companies on a tight budget?
You should always be smart about how storage is provisioned. What I mean by smart is that you don’t necessarily have to be fancy; you have to be very tight. You have to run a tight shop, use standard LUN sizes, use host-based volume management and you have to use a good storage resource management tool that keeps tabs on how storage gets utilized, what is your trending and how are the storage requests coming into your environment. Essentially you need a trend analysis that keeps a tab on how much storage you need and how much storage you need to buy. Then it gives you an end-to-end view from the server to the array level. Eventually, once you’ve cleaned up your shop you will realize that if you need to go for thin provisioning it’s only to improve the value of what you have, and not a substitute for what you already have. So, I would say start with creating a tight storage management shop and then examining thin provisioning as a version 2.0, which would still be valuable, but its valu
