Storage Thin Provisioning

Most of the software and storage are supporting think provisioning today. As most of us know that this features provide the users to fully utilize the available storage for the business. Previously, we may consume extra storage space which is idle or unused due to the risk of storage grow rapidly always. In order to re size the partition of the production system, it always require a down time of production to minimize the risk of data corruption.

Today, with thin provisioning, we will able to forecast the storage allocation as usual which include the buffer require for storage grow, which even allow the administrator to increase the percentage of buffer for every volume it created. Without putting extra money on the storage system, we will able to achieve by using thin provisioning. Example I may have a LUN with 1TB usable storage, but I will able to assign total of 5TB to five different servers which contain 1TB each. As long as the initial data consume is within 1TB, it will be fine. Beside that, the thin provisioning will have the intelligent to increase the actual allocation automatically on the fly, which is no down time. From OS perspective, it will always recognize as 1TB no matter on Windows or Linux, this has provide a down time saving for our business today. Of course, the storage will provide monitoring features to ensure the capacity warning is alert before it full, therefore, the storage administrator will able to add the storage to the environment on actual consume basis.