Thin Provisioning

[acedpogi]

what do you mean by thin provisioning?

[Uwe Zessin]

It means promising more storage capacity to a client than you really have available.

For example, offer a disk to a file server that says it has 1 TeraByte while you only have physical disk drives good for 250 GigaBytes and no money right now to buy more, but you know that the file server does not need all the space today.

So in 3 or 6 month when more space is needed and money is available you can buy the disks and transparently add them to your storage without having to touch the file server again.

That is a great idea, but it requires close monitoring and predictable data growth. Otherwise you could end up in a disaster. Imagine what happens when you users see that they have 1TB space to fill with data ?

[acedpogi]

thanks