- by Craig Simpson

Recently a competitor, EMC, announced that they are one of the last major block storage vendors to join the Thin Provisioning party. That’s not the way they said it, but if you’re keeping score that’s the way it was. Amazingly enough EMC is often considered a leader in the storage industry. So how did a storage “leader” miss such an important development?

The blogosphere provides some good clues. In December of 2006 EMC’s Chuck Hollis blogged, “Don’t Write A Check You Can’t Cash.”

In that blog Chuck decides that the reason thin provisioning is interesting is because, “storage management discipline isn't so great in many shops.” In fact his stated opinion is that, “if reasonable storage management policies were in place, there wouldn't be quite so much interest.” Apparently most of our storage management processes weren’t measuring up to Chuck’s standards.

Now I don’t believe that Chuck and the others at EMC are dumb, nor ordinarily quite so rude. But I do believe they start and end every day as first a storage vendor, then owners of some other IT related businesses. At HP we start every day as a complete IT solution provider. Yes, we’re number 1 in disk storage. But we’re also leaders in servers, networks, IT management, IT services, PC’s, etc. We see the whole picture. We know that management costs are rapidly becoming the dominant cost in IT. Therefore our products and services have to help CIO’s control those costs.

Because we think that way we recognize every app involves an app administrator, a server administrator, a storage administrator, and often more. Those people can’t be meeting every day to make sure every app has all the GB’s it needs. They don’t have time. That’s why technologies like thin provisioning are so important. It lets you keep the apps running without excessive over-provisioning or imposing yet another time consuming process on a group of already overloaded IT personnel.

At HP our people have a great depth of storage expertise. But they also have a breadth of IT expertise through which we recognize the importance of IT administration costs. That’s why you see key technologies like thin provisioning and easy to use storage management products like Storage Essentials from HP. We know that you need a bullet proof IT infrastructure that scales capacity, not headcount. Give us a call to learn how HP can make it happen for you.

Craig