What is thin provisioning?
Date: January 24th, 2008
Author: Scott Lowe
Think back. Remember when you used to buy servers on a three-year cycle with direct-attached storage? At purchase-time, you needed to project out for three years what kind of storage needs you might need on that particular server. This kind of projection often resulted in an overbuilt server built with “just in case†variables and also resulted in a lot of wasted space for much of the life of the server. In many cases, organizations don't come close to filling up the storage, which means that money was spent for nothing. The organizations made the choice to gamble a little money up front in order to avoud having to possibly spend a lot of money if they ran of space.
