Dynamic Provisioning

Thin provisioning is an approach to managing storage that maximizes physical storage capacity. Instead of reserving a fixed amount of storage for a volume, capacity from the available physical pool is assigned when data is actually written to the storage media.

Thin provisioning provides automatic performance optimization and storage space savings across pools of virtual capacity. Provisioning storage from a virtual pool reduces administration costs by cutting the time to provision new storage. Capacity is allocated to an application without it being physically mapped until it is used. In this approach, it is possible to achieve overall higher rates of storage utilization with just-in-time provisioning. It also simplifies performance optimization by transparently spreading workloads across many physical devices, thereby reducing performance management concerns and self-optimizing performance and throughput.

Parent Topic

• Introduction to provisioning

  There are several provisioning strategies that you can implement on your storage system to solve business requirements. Provisioning your storage system requires balancing the costs of the solution with the benefits that the solution provides.

Child Topics

• About Dynamic Provisioning
• Dynamic Provisioning concepts
• Advantages of using Dynamic Provisioning
• Storing Thin Image pair and snapshot data in a Dynamic Provisioning pool

  You can create Thin Image (TI) pairs and store snapshot data in a Dynamic Provisioning pool.

• DP-VOL with data direct mapping attribute
• Estimating the required capacity of pool-VOLs with System Area in the pool of the data direct mapping attribute

  If you want to expand a pool of the data direct mapping attribute, you must free up space in the pool. Make sure that the estimated capacity of free space is available before expanding the pool.

• Dynamic Provisioning high-level workflow
• Capacity saving and accelerated compression functions
• Capacity saving function: data deduplication and compression

  When the capacity saving function is in use, the controller of the storage system performs data deduplication and compression to reduce the size of data to be stored. Capacity saving can be enabled on DP-VOLs in Dynamic Provisioning pools. You can use the capacity saving function on internal flash drives only, including data stored on encrypted flash drives.

• About pool volumes from accelerated compression-enabled parity groups

  Volumes carved from accelerated compression-enabled parity groups can only be used as pool volumes to create or expand a pool. Pools that contain pool volumes from accelerated compression-enabled parity groups must be monitored to ensure adequate pool capacity. You can set thresholds for used pool capacity that trigger the output of SIMs when exceeded, enabling you to expand the pool or delete unwanted data before the pool becomes full.