Two years ago, business growth strained all facets of the New York City-based Visual Trading Systems’ IT infrastructure. The SMB, which provides IT services to companies involved in foreign exchange, experienced increased storage demands but couldn’t automatically use excess capacity that resided in its four data centers and 10 offices around the world. Storage resources were pre-allocated and required manual provisioning to provide additional storage to applications that were running low.

John Duffy, the company’s enterprise architect, selected 3PAR’s InServ Storage Server with thin provisioning in June of 2007 to aggregate unused capacity into a virtual pool that could be shared across the organization. As a result, storage utilization rates now approach 80% — much better than Visual Trading Systems’ historical average of 25% for Windows storage and 50% for Unix storage.

Traditionally, if an application is forecasted to consume a terabyte of storage space over a five-year period, the entire terabyte is purchased and deployed in the first year. The extra drives use up electricity and occupy dataroom real estate, while generating heat, which requires cooling. With thin provisioning, excess storage capacity across the organization is automatically provisioned to applications that experience a storage deficit.

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