(Posted LinkedIn Sept 2013)
We have been extremely lucky to secure licences from Raxco Software (thanks goes out to Bob Nolan & team) for their PerfectStorage product that automates thin provisioned space reclaiming via SCSI UNMAP and their Smart Zero Fill technology.
Our environment consists of dual 3PAR P10400 (v400) SANs, 85% virtualised on vSphere 5.1 U1 and I have been manually forcing the reclaim of space via FSUTIL and VMKFSTOOLS. I had partially automated this process by pushing scripts on to servers to run. This process worked fine, but it’s manual and painful on a large environment, and I would rather be spending my time on more important things…like blogging on LinkedIn to inform my fellow geeks.
I will be installing, configuring and automating the process with PerfectStorage in the coming weeks. I will be posting results of how much space we reclaimed, the effort it required, and any other juicy bits I find – so watch this space.
If you want to check out the Raxco PerfectStorage solution here is the url:
http://www.raxco.com/business/products/perfectstorage
Musings from a past life 