Best practices to realize space savings with LUNs and dedup?

[amiller_1]

Since you can't shrink a LUN (Windows 2008 excepted) even if dedup has freed up space in the volume, we have to use thin provisioning in a SAN environment to realize deduplicated space savings.

Given the pain of getting caught having provisioned too much space (i.e. LUNs go offline), what are are you using for thin provisioning settings and monitoring? (Operations Manager, custom scripts, policies, etc.)

[calvarez]

Operations Manager provides the tools for managing thin provisioned space.  Included are thin provisioning thresholds, alert generation, and the ability to run commands/scripts to add more storage.  Operations Manager also provides reporting for thin provisioning to show current status and savings, as well as growth rates, trends, and projections for planning.

[calvarez]

One additional note.

Best practices for deduplication are included in the deduplication Deployment and Implementation Guide,

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3505.pdf

[amiller_1]

Thanks much for the answer -- I was thinking of Operations Manager but wasn't sure if there were any other answers.

Having some info built into System Manager (particularly when making a new volume) would be very nice as well down the road (OM is great but is a separate install/item to remember to look at).