What are the benefits of thin provisioning?
The key benefit of thin provisioning is the ability to over-allocate storage and essentially try and squeeze as much storage that is provisioned to systems that is not actually used. What makes this particularly attractive is that if you have “x” storage provisioned, how much is really used by the server? The industry average is not more than 20%, which means that 80% of storage provisioned to servers is wasted because the system administrators have that overhead and don’t want to give it back. So that storage really gets wasted and, as a result, your budget gets higher and higher because you’re essentially providing more storage than you really need. So the benefit of thin provisioning is the ability to get that storage back into the storage pool and be able to use it only as the server needs it and not as the demand comes in. The other benefit of thin provisioning is performance. It’s sort of a side benefit because not many people really advertise thin provisioning as a performance-e
