Thin Provisioning: The Future Is Bright

The recently released Gartner Hype Cycle Report 2009 has evaluated and highlighted the technologies that will have an impact on Indian enterprises in 2009 as they look at increased technology adoption to support growth and competitive differentiation.

The Hype Cycle is based on a cycle of consultations with CIOs and vendors in India. Gartner’s report was prepared in about two-and-a-half months and is based on discussions with approximately 150 CIOs operating out of the country. The CIOs interrogated span a cross section of business verticals although more responses are from the BFSI vertical.

When asked about the absence of any security technologies in the Hype Cycle, Diptarup Chakraborti, principal research analyst at Gartner India, said, “Technologies like thin provisioning, data de-duplication, cloud computing and server virtualisation mentioned in the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ section have underlying security technologies that deal with the security aspect of the parent product.”

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Talking about the technologies featured in the Hype Cycle, Chakraborti said, “These technologies have been picking up in the market since some time and are now at the peak of their adoption rate, which indicates they will go mainstream in 2009.”

Thin Provisioning: CIO Perspective

Thin provisioning, as per Gartner’s Hype Cycle report, is at the peak of inflated expectations currently. Rajendra Sawant, CIO, Adventity, said, “We are using thin provisioning technology from EMC that has enabled huge progress in lowering energy consumption and limiting the purchase of multiple storage devices”.

“Adventity operates in the BPO vertical and manages clients having discrete storage requirements,” said Sawant. So instead of adding new storage devices all the time, the thin client solution manages to use the existing Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) products efficiently and thus, the technology delivers good results for the CIO with cost savings in the mid-term including power savings, additional storage device savings, less heat generated etc.

Ajay Khanvilkar, senior assistant GM-IT, Hindustan Dorr-Oliver agreed with Gartner’s prediction of thin provisioning becoming a mainstream technology in 2009. “We have run some POCs (Proof-of-Concepts) of the thin provisioning solution based on Linux,” said Khanvilkar. However, he still has concerns as to how far the Linux-based platform will be compatible with the company’s existing Windows Operating System. Currently, the company is using Windows-based thick clients and its mailing solution is on Red Hat Linux.

Thin provisioning offers handsome savings on the cost front. “It would cost us about Rs16,000 to run those machines compared to the Rs 32,000 we are spending on Windows-based machines currently,” said Khanvilkar.

Thin client provisioning technology is also reasonably affordable when one takes version upgrades into consideration. There is not much cost involved whereas Windows upgrades are hardware hungry and cost much more.

The other advantage with thin client technology is that data gets saved at the server end and not on the employee’s machine, which has its own advantages. This is a huge plus for employees, who keep switching locations. “They can access the data residing on their machine from any location as it is resident on the server and not on the machine,” Khanvilkar concluded.