What is Thin Provision and Thin Reclamation in Storage Industry

This document discusses the concepts of "Thin Provision" and "Thin Reclamation" in Storage industry.

• Thin Provision

      Thin Provision is an array vendor solution for allocating storage to applications only when the storage is truly needed, from a pool of free storage. The thin storage solution tries to solve the problem of under utilization of available array capacity.  In VMware product ESX, its virtual machine disk can be format 'Thin Provision' so that the disk space for the virtual machine can be allocated dynamically according to the real requirements.

• Thin Reclamation

      Thin Reclamation means reclaiming free storage from the file systems or disks in the LUN or array so that this storage is released to the free storage pool. It is an opposite concept to 'Thin Provision'. Veritas Storage Foundation supports both Thin Provision and Thin Reclamation.

Regards,

edward @ 17:46:50, 2009-11-18