Thin provisioning – HP XP P9500 Storage User Manual

Page 18

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Thin provisioning

Thin provisioning is an approach to managing storage that maximizes physical storage capacity.
Instead of reserving a fixed amount of storage, it simply removes capacity from the available pool
when data is actually written to disk.

Thin provisioning includes:

“Thin Provisioning” (page 18)

“Smart Tiers” (page 22)

Thin Provisioning

Though basic or traditional provisioning strategies can be appropriate and useful in specific
scenarios, they can be expensive to set up, awkward and time consuming to configure, difficult to
monitor, and error prone when maintaining storage.

Thin Provisioning is a simpler alternative to the traditional provisioning methods. It uses thin
provisioning technology that allows you to allocate virtual storage capacity based on anticipated
future capacity needs, using virtual volumes instead of physical disks.

Overall storage use rates may improve because you can potentially provide more virtual capacity
to applications while fully using fewer physical disks. It provides lower initial cost, greater efficiency,
and storage management freedom for storage administrators. In this way, Thin Provisioning software:

Simplifies storage management

Self-balances resource use and optimizes performance

Maximizes physical disk usage

18

Introduction to provisioning

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