ABSTRACT

The complexity of managing IT networks and rising costs push almost all companies into the
“lean zone”. For a decade now, businesses have been relentlessly striving to bring control over
expenditure towards running, operating and maintaining networks and technology has been
improving by leaps and bounds trying to meet these soaring demands. Of all these technologies
for data storage, Thin Provisioning is a great option.

Thin Provisioning optimizes and fine tunes the efficiency with which storage space is allocated
on SAN (Storage Area Networks), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and other network storage
protocols. Thin provisioning works by allocating storage space efficiency and in a flexible
manner among multiple users within the network by gauging how much space a given user needs
at any given point in time.

Typically, in the storage models that, plenty of storage space is allocated and this is usually a lot
compared to the actual needs. Companies invest space in anticipation of growth and necessity.
Often, the usage levels are quite low when compared to the amount of storage space available.
This is a ridiculous waste of valuable storage space, computing resources, data centre upkeep
costs, man power required to monitor network usage, electricity costs, hardware requirements,
etc.

The way thin provisioning works is by managing data in “chunks” – think of it as a basic
capacity management unit. When a user from a host computer tries to access computing facilities
the thin provisioning system distributes the first available virtual storage chunk to the actual
physical host – this provisioning boosts storage capacity utilization by a whopping 50%.