For all the advancements in the enterprise, UI often seems to be a tertiary concern at best. We still see companies bragging that their dashboards have finally started using HTML5, when that’s been the standard for six or seven years on the consumer side. Given that a lot of tools are still designed for CLI, I guess it’s not all that surprising.
But in this post, Erik Ableson makes the case that bad UI can be bad for business. In this case, he highlights a common misstep taken in the UI for Thin Provisioning. These often will show storage in a classic green-yellow-red formulation. The issue is that these tools will show a storage bay in the red when it is 100% allocated. Erik provides a quality overview of why this isn’t a critical “red” condition when it comes to thin provisioning. It might not be that efficient in the long run, but high allocation is kind of the point.
Erik Ableson comments:
Anyway the point I wanted to make here was that thin provisioned volumes on a storage bay that are red because they are 100% allocated are not a reason to panic. UI designers please take note. On the other hand start ringing bells and putting up flashing alerts when the allocated space exceeds the physical capacity of the system because without this people can dig themselves in pretty deep if they’re not paying attention.
Read more at: Revisiting Thin Provisioning
