What are the alternatives to thin provisioning?
What is thin provisioning and how does it work? Thin provisioning, which is also called dynamic provisioning by some vendors, creates an additional layer of “virtualization.” I’m using the word “virtualization” in a very loose manner here. What it really does is create this layer of how storage is traditionally provisioned and how the host that sees this storage. This layer allows you to do two things: First, it allows you to allocate storage as it gets written by the system. Typically, in a traditional storage environment, once you provision the storage, the array considers it as used. It doesn’t know how much the server has actually written to it. In this case, it actually allocates storage as the server starts writing to storage, so it’s essentially write on-demand, which gives thin provisioning its name. So what it means is that if you provision 100 GB of storage to a server, but the server only writes 10 GB, in a traditional environment all of those gigabytes would be marked as us
