NetApp thin provisioning is designed to allow you to present more logical storage to hosts or users than you actually have in your physical storage pool. Instead of allocating space upfront, storage space is dynamically allocated to each volume or LUN as data is written. In most configurations, free space is also released back to your common storage pool when data in the volume or LUN is deleted (and is not being held by any Snapshot copies).
Example:
There are many situations in which you can end up allocating a lot of storage, only to have it sit unused for a long time. For example, one design college estimated that it needed 27.5TB of storage just for the storage allocations of its students and faculty, but most of them use little or none of that storage.
However, by using thin provisioning on its NetApp storage, this college has been able to support these allocations with just 3.5TB of physical storage running at 80% utilization (an overallocation ratio of more than 8:1). Purchasing the additional storage would have created an incremental expense of more than $90K, which has been avoided with thin provisioning.
Benefits of Storage Provisioning:
Ø it can save you from having a large amount of allocated but unoccupied storage.
Ø Capex Expense
Ø Operating expense Less datacenter space and requires less electricity, cooling.
Ø Because storage prices continue to drop, when you do have to purchase additional capacity it will likely be cheaper than if you had purchased that capacity upfront
Ø Capacity planning is simplified because you are able to manage a single pool of free storage. Multiple applications or users can allocate storage from the same free pool, avoiding the situation in which some volumes are capacity constrained while others have capacity to spare
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