The buzz over virtualization is well deserved, as this is one of the most exciting leaps forward in business technology to emerge in quite some time. However, a move toward virtualization with a skilled IT company providing remote services does not eliminate the need for a sound storage approach for the information used in virtual data centers. Thin provisioning is an approach to storage needs that helps businesses to maximize its use of resources and lower their costs.
What is Thin Provisioning?
Thin provisioning is also called dynamic provisioning, referring to the ability to allocate storage space on a changing basis in order to match it to the current needs of the computing environment.
Thin Provisioning Saves Space
In a traditional storage solution, physical storage is assigned to applications and is afterwards ‘locked in’ to that assignment. For example, the storage management system might assign 50 or even 100 GB to a given application on the presumption that the amount assigned is the maximum that could be needed. While this approach is adopted to prevent conflicts in the future, it means that for the present there are many GB being wasted because it may take the application literally years to reach its maximum needed storage.
Thin provisioning involves creating a logical unit number (LUN) that represents the maximum needed storage, but then assigning only a small portion of that storage to begin with – perhaps 10 percent. The rest of the storage is theoretical at this point, but the system is set up to include it later if the company decides to invest more money in purchasing additional physical storage to assign to the LUN.