Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Companies face an uphill battle when it comes to managing storage capacity effectively: Utilization is low (often around 40%), they have inadequate forecasting capabilities, and there is poor communication between the storage organization and application owners. Because storage provisioning is a complex and time-consuming process, application owners generally ask for more capacity than they need but rarely use what they get, leaving costly storage capacity reserved but unused. Thin provisioning proposes to solve this problem by reserving storage capacity only when applications actually write data to disk, creating a "just-in-time" storage provisioning model. Thin provisioning has been available for several years from a small group of storage vendors, but with new focus on wasted storage capacity and power costs, it has gathered more widespread interest, forcing leading storage vendors to jump on the bandwagon. Given their struggles with management and utilization, thin provisioning is a technology that every storage organization should consider as part of its next purchase.

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