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.

Parent Topic

• Provisioning

  The advanced provisioning software products and features of the storage systems enable you to implement the appropriate provisioning strategies for your operational environment and improve performance and capacity utilization. Dynamic Provisioning allows you to reserve virtual storage capacity based on anticipated future capacity needs using virtual volumes instead of physical disk capacity, providing lower initial cost, greater efficiency, and ease of storage management.

Child Topics

• About provisioning
• Key terms
• Basic provisioning

  Several basic provisioning techniques traditionally are used to manage storage volumes. These strategies are useful in specific scenarios based on user needs, such as what type of storage to use or how to manually size volumes. Basic provisioning relies on carving up physical storage into logical devices. Custom-size volumes are configured by using the Virtual LUN software.

• Complementary functions
• 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.

• Dynamic Tiering

  Dynamic Tiering (HDT) simplifies storage administration by automatically optimizing data placement in 1, 2 or 3 tiers of storage that can be defined and used within a single virtual volume. Tiers of storage can be made up of internal or external (virtualized) storage, and use of HDT can lower capital costs. Simplified and unified management of HDT allows for lower operational costs and reduces the challenges of ensuring applications are placed on the appropriate classes of storage.

• Requirements

  In addition to basic hardware and licensing requirements, certain provisioning strategies and implementations have additional requirements.