About provisioning

Provisioning is a method of managing storage system devices or volumes. Some provisioning methods are host-based, while others use existing storage system capabilities such as concatenated array groups. Some provisioning methods are hardware-based, and others are software-based. Each technique has its particular use and benefit, for example, capacity, reliability, performance, or cost considerations, in a given storage environment. Used in the wrong scenario, each can be expensive, awkward, time consuming to configure and maintain, and can be potentially error prone. Your support representatives are available to help you configure the highest quality solution for your storage environment.

Provisioning strategies falls into two fundamental categories:

• Basic provisioning (or traditional provisioning). Basic provisioning includes logical devices (LDEVs) and custom-sized volumes.

• Dynamic Provisioning Overview (or virtual provisioning). Thin provisioning includes pooling physical storage and creating logical devices for hosts.