DS8000 Thin Provisioning

Ever-increasing storage demands have a negative impact on an organization's IT budget and complicate the overall storage infrastructure and management. Companies are looking at ways to use their storage resources more efficiently.

Thin provisioning can help by reducing the amount of unused storage typically allocated to applications or users. Thin provisioning, now available for the IBM DS8000®, defers the allocation of actual space on the storage system until the time that the data must effectively be written to disk.

This IBM® Redpaper™ publication provides an overall understanding of how thin provisioning works on the DS8000. It provides insights into the functional design and its implementation on the DS8000 and contains illustrations for the configuration of thin-provisioned volumes from either the DS GUI or the DS CLI.

This edition reflects the capability to define an extent space-efficient (ESE) repository, which was introduced with the DS8870 Release 7.2 firmware.

This paper also includes considerations that will help you decide which applications will effectively benefit from thin provisioning. It takes you through scenarios and utilities for migrating from standard volumes to thin-provisioned volumes.