Storage Business Pointers - Cost, Performance, Capacity, Availability, Scalability & Thin Provisioning.

Before reading my upcoming DAS, SAN & NAS related technical Posts, it's important for we all to know the basic Storage Business terminologies such as COST, AVAILABILITY, CAPACITY, SCALABILITY, PERFORMANCE & THIN PROVISIONING.
Because, the Storage domain comprising different technologies, Topologies, Protocols, Interfaces, Platforms, Architectures, Implementations etc. are driving the storage Business in terms of cost, Performance, Capacity, Scalability, Availability & Thin Provisioning.

Capacity: The trend of Data Storage Capacity growth rate has not only followed Moore's Law for decades but also, going to surpass it in the future.
(Moore's Law: Data storage growth rate is exponential & doubles every 18 months). the requirement of data storage space is increasing and hence Capacity is the generic term yet very important factor to consider for all the storage design & implementations.

Scalability: Scalability is the ability of storage solution (design & implementation) to satisfy the Current storage requirements & also, to provide easy & effective mechanism for expansion of storage resources for the ever increasing future storage capacity demands.
Most of the storage solutions provided by different vendors are based on different technologies, Protocols, Interfaces, Platforms, Architectures & hence while making expansion of storage resources for future needs, it is important to consider the Scalability factor.

Performance: the bandwidth for delivering storage content is growing to match the increased speed of computer processing power, the speed of data communication networks,
and the speed requirement of emerging applications such as multimedia applications. for example, Fibre Channel is innovated over period of time from 1Gbits/Sec to 4Gbits/sec or more.

Availability: it is the factor by which we can emphasis on the need for making Storage solutions more reliable and provide 24/7 availability for the demanding applications (ex: Banking, Financial Applications etc.).
Mission critical storage networks are required to achieve 99.999 availability and the capability to recover from catastrophic disasters via mirroring and backup techniques that protect the content through geographic diversity.

Cost: Cost is very important factor to consider because anything & everything on the earth is available to anybody with associated cost. Storage solutions are available to customer with associated cost that includes Hardware system & Software costs, design, implementation, Maintenance & management costs.
the business emphasis is to maintain low or affordable cost to customers & to provide more reliable, scalable, available storage solutions.

Thin Provisioning: The major factor that affected traditional Storage solutions was inefficient 'Storage provisioning'. Provisioning is the method of effective allocation & utilization of storage resources.
The most obvious issue of traditional Storage solutions is the amount of allocated storage that becomes unused and therefore increases the total cost of ownership. Additionally, since this allocated but unused storage capacity cannot be reclaimed for other applications, customers have to buy more storage capacity as their environments grow, increasing cost even further.
At some point, customers may actually be required to buy a completely new storage system in addition to the one they have in place.
Eventually, Thin Provisioning has become the buzz word of storage business. Thin Provisioning eliminates the 'Over-allocation or over-subscription' problem of traditional provisioning & implements 'Just-in-Time allocation of storage resources using which Administrators can efficiently & effectively optimize the existing storage capacity.