For 3PAR, which has been shipping its system for less than a year, the feature promises to help it better compete against the Big 3 that dominate the high-end RAID array business: EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). To date, 3PAR has managed to sell a couple of dozen systems, but that's a drop in the bucket for EMC, HDS, or IBM (see 3PAR Hits Up Hitachi and 3PAR Sells 20 Systems).
Scott believes Thin Provisioning will allow 3PAR to offer the same overall system as competing vendors, but at a much lower initial price -- as much as one third or less the upfront cost.
Here's how he figures the math: Say an application is provisioned for 8 TBytes. In a RAID 1 configuration, that becomes 16 TBytes for the base volume. If you add one local copy and one remote copy of the data, that's 48 TBytes in all. At 5 cents per MByte, that much storage would cost $2.4 million.
By contrast, with 3PAR's Thin Provisioning, a customer can start with 2 TBytes of storage capacity, assuming the original 8 TBytes will be only 25 percent utilized. The total storage required is 10 TBytes (the original 2 TBytes; 2 Tbytes for RAID 1; 2 Tbytes for a local copy using 3PAR's copy-on-write feature; and 4 Tbytes for the remote copy), which at 3PAR's pricing of 7.5 cents per MByte would come to $750,000.
So if this is such a fantastic idea, why haven't the likes of EMC or IBM adopted it? Scott says they can't afford to, because it would drastically shrink their existing revenue streams.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
