Thin Provisioning
Optimize the Utilization of the Available Storage

Increased Capacity Efficiency, Cost Savings and Better Storage Provisioning

Whenever there is a need for setting up a new virtual machine, administrators face the question of how much disk space they need to allocate for the VM. By taking the advantage of thin provisioning, you can allocate all of the storage that you’ll need and stop worrying about wasting storage.

Thin provisioning is a storage capacity saving feature. It allows you to provision more storage visible to users than physically available on the system. This is possible because on average users never occupy 100% of what they are provisioned. If you have 10 users that are given 1 TB each, but on average they only fill their volumes with 0.5 TB of data, a thinly provisioned physical system would only need 5 TB of physical space, plus a safety margin.

StorPool has built-in thin provisioning, so any stripe which does not hold data takes zero space on the drives. The space for this stripe is allocated only when data for it appears.


Business Benefits

• removing unused reserve space
• better hardware utilization
• maximizing physical storage capacity
• increasing physical storage capacity

Technical Benefits

• cost reduction
• increased efficiency
• host more customers on less hardware
• better capacity planning and easier growth