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Storage Allocation and Efficient usage of Storage

By KIRAN K L posted Tue March 26, 2024 05:41 AM

  

Storage Allocation and Efficient usage of Storage

In Today’s word the data has been growing tremendously and data has become integral part of everyone’s lives. Technology has grown in very fast pace and what the world has not seen on 19th Century [100 Years] has been seen on last 25 years and we can’t predict what will happen in next 10-20 Years.

Fig 1: Represents the data usage from 2010 to all the way to 2024 in Zettabytes.

So, what is Zettabytes? How much of data is 1 Zettabytes – To understand this please refer to below chart. The chart [Fig 2] represents the measurement of the data or we can call it as unit of data measurement.

If we all remember in early 2010’s we all have smart mobile releasing into market and 512MB memory card was the highest memory, we all saw and now in 15 Years the data storage technology has grown in such a pace that we all are completely dependent on data for our daily lives.

In all these changes happening around AI - Artificial Intelligence plays very crucial role in today’s software industry and all the major IT Companies are already utilising the AI features which has been a breakthrough in a recent day.

Since the data is growing the storage has become key-element in day-day activities. Earlier when the computers were discovered we had a storage on the bigger rooms and due to technological advancement now it has become very small, and we all are holding it in packet.

Here in this paper, I want to explain about the small part of the storage which helped our storage providers allocate/provision the storage to customers in a very efficient way.

We can provision a storage in two types:

[1] Thick Provisioning

Consider a scenario where, we have customer asking for 100GB of data, but he rarely uses 30-50GB and rest of the 50GB will sit idle. Even though we have storage available it is not usable. Like we have a laptop and having 2TB storage and it takes months/years to completely use this storage, but we still buy it right!? This way of provisioning the storage is called Thick Provisioning where the data is solely allocated to single user.

[2] Thin Provisioning

What if I tell you that we have a 1TB of storage and I can provision it to multiple customers, and it shows 1TB to all the customers even though they don’t have complete storage. Sounds little odd but its possible.

Consider a scenario where we have 4 customers, and everyone want 1TB of storage and using only 1TB of storage I can allocate it to all 4 customers and monitor the usage internally. Suppose two customers are using 200GB Each and other customer using 100GB each – Now 600GB is in use and 400GB is still free. As soon as we are near to 1TB we can add more storage according to usage and this type of provisioning is called Thin Provisioning

Below image represents the thin and thick provisioning visually and helps us to understand it in a better way.

Fig 3 :Thick provision shows Allocation but not used data and thin provision shows how efficiently the data has been used.

Does thin provisioning affect performance?

A thin-provisioned disk exhibits the same performance as a lazy-zeroed thick-provisioned disk. Lazy zeroing simply means that existing data (binary ones and zeroes) is overwritten without being converted to all zeroes first.

Eager zeroing, by contrast, wipes a disk clean when data is deleted (turning it to zeroes) and new data is written on this blank slate. A thick-provisioned eager-zeroing disk will write data faster than a thin-provisioned disk.

Because of overprovisioning, thin provisioning will cause problems when users approach their maximum storage capacity.

It’s useful to compare disk provisioning methods to banks. A “thick-provisioned” bank would keep sufficient cash on hand to cover all its deposit accounts.

Yet most banks instead choose to operate as “thin provisioned” storage disks would, with only a portion of the cash on hand. When too many depositors seek to withdraw their funds at once, the cash is exhausted, causing a run on the bank. The same issue can occur with thin provisioning. If users seek to write more data than there is physical storage space, the drive will max out and they’ll be unable to save anything.

Therefore, it’s crucial that system administrators continuously monitor storage use, adding new capacity when needed.

To conclude this paper we have different methods of efficiently provisioning the data to our customers but provisioning plays very important role in data storage technology.


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Lavisha Bhatia
Tue March 26, 2024 06:19 AM

Enlightening!