ABSTRACT
The commonly faced problem by IT organizations is how to respond to business unit requests for new storage capacity. One very common approach is to add storage to existing servers; this approach is simple but has well-documented high total costs of ownership. Overprovisioning is commonplace in IT storage; it is amplified in situations where lots of little silos all have an excess fifty percent of unused storage. Thin provisioning is a way around that problem; by using larger centralized storage, thin provisioning enables virtual volume storage capacity to be assigned to servers. Storage capacity can be allocated to servers quickly and easily. An interesting benefit of thin provisioning in Service Level Agreements and IT bill-back situations is that thin provisioning allows a storage administrator to allocate 500 GB to a server, but physically allocate 300 GB to that server.
