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It's Not The Same Old Block Storage: Page 2 of 2

It also means vendors that designed their systems to use chunks for data protection mapping five data chunks and one parity chunk on some drives rather than assigning drives to RAID sets like Compellent, 3Par and to some extent HP's EVA, have the inside track over conventional designs that need abstraction layers added to do thin, etc.

But the biggest impact is that on a wide stripped, deduped, thin provisioned, auto-tiered array there is no such thing as sequential I/O. Your data isn't on the same track of the drives in the RAID set, it's where ever the array controller decided was the best place for it. Cache, flash and smart software allow the system to deliver data as if it were sequential but old tools like defragmenting a Windows volume aren't doing any good any more.  

Welcome to the 21st century. Please keep your hands in the car at all times. "The way we've always done it" isn't good enough any more.