At Storage Networking World this week 3PAR announced a suite of new "thin" software products aimed at cutting storage hardware costs, increasing storage utilization and overall data center energy efficiency.

3PAR unveiled four new products: Thin Conversion, Thin Persistence, Thin Copy Reclamation and Thin Reclamation, all of which are designed to work with the company's InServ storage arrays to improve efficiency and cut costs.

Thin Conversion aims to cut costs associated with hardware refreshes; the software is able to map unused storage capacity in existing machines and, using 3PAR's Thin Engine virtualization software, can consolidate storage onto fewer, more efficient machines. The company projects savings of as much as 75 percent of capacity and cost savings of up to 60 percent from using the software.

Thin Persistence and Thin Copy Reclamation are two applications that work to detect unused storage space in both physical and virtual storage systems, clearing up space in data center storage racks.

"Thin provisioning should be widely deployed in most datacenters because it is an easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy disk storage system capacity reduction feature that lowers storage TCO, usually without any significant effects on native performance/throughput," said Stanley Zaffos, Storage and I/O Research Vice President at Gartner, said in a statement released by 3PAR. "The potential savings in storage capacity attributable to thin provisioning demand that it at least be considered in most technology refreshes of legacy storage systems."

Finally, working together with Symantec, 3PAR has developed its Thin Reclamation API that works with InServ machines to automatically monitor and reclaim unused storage space in data centers.

The new products all amount to ways for IT managers to streamline data center storage costs, both in existing facilities and during the course of hardware refreshes. As a recent article on GreenerComputing found finding truly green and efficient ways to handle data center storage is a growing need for companies of all sizes.

_{Storage rack photo CC-licensed by Flickr user skimaniac.}