About Dynamic Provisioning

While basic or traditional provisioning strategies can be appropriate and useful in specific scenarios, they can be expensive to set up, time-consuming to configure, difficult to monitor, and error prone. Dynamic Provisioning allows you to reserve virtual storage capacity based on anticipated future capacity needs, using virtual volumes instead of physical disk capacity. Although Dynamic Provisioning requires some additional setup steps, it can provide a simpler and more beneficial alternative to traditional provisioning methods.

Overall storage use rates can improve because you can potentially provide more virtual capacity to applications while using fewer physical drives. Dynamic Provisioning can provide lower initial cost, greater efficiency, and ease of storage management for storage administrators. The Dynamic Provisioning feature offers the following benefits:

• Simplifies storage management

• Provides a better balance of resources and performance optimization by default than traditional provisioning

• Optimizes physical drive usage

• Reduces device address requirements over traditional provisioning by providing larger volume sizes

When to use Dynamic Provisioning

Dynamic Provisioning is a best fit in an open-systems environment in the following scenarios:

• When the aggregation of storage pool capacity usage across many volumes provides the best opportunity for performance optimization.

• For stable environments and large consistently growing files or volumes.

• When device addressing constraints are a concern.