How do you decide between thin and thick provisioning for your storage needs?

Thin provisioning enables the allocation of storage space beyond what's physically available, creating large logical volumes or LUNs without immediate physical consumption. It optimizes storage usage by dynamically allocating space as data is written, preventing waste and overprovisioning.

Thick provisioning allocates the full storage space upfront to applications and data upon creation. This requires specifying the exact size of logical volumes or LUNs and reserving corresponding physical space on storage devices. It ensures performance and availability without fragmentation or contention concerns.

Thin provisioning optimizes storage usage by allocating space only as needed, reducing physical space requirements and delaying hardware purchases. It eliminates overprovisioning, enhancing efficiency, and allows reclaiming unused space. Simplifies management by reducing volumes to monitor and adjust, offering flexibility to scale storage dynamically with data growth.

Without constant monitoring of storage resources, you may become overprovisioned and not even realize it. In a lot of cases, starting out thin is the way to go to minimize used capacity, but over time as those resources are used and consume more capacity or sys admins request more storage to compensate for growing systems, you may hit that capacity wall and then scramble to add more.

Drawbacks of thin provisioning include: - Complexity: Requires meticulous capacity planning and ongoing monitoring for potential space shortages or performance issues. - Risk of Space Exhaustion: Data growth exceeding projections can lead to running out of allocated space, risking system crashes or data loss. - Performance Concerns: Dynamic allocation processes may introduce overhead, potentially affecting performance, especially in high-demand environments. - Dependency on Features: Depending on the system, enabling features like thin reclamation or deduplication might be necessary, adding to the complexity and potential compatibility issues.

Benefits of thick provisioning include: - Performance and Availability Assurance: Full allocation of storage space upfront ensures consistent performance and availability without the overhead of dynamically allocating space. - Reduced Complexity: Eliminates the need for continuous capacity and performance monitoring, simplifying storage management tasks. - Risk Mitigation: Minimizes the risk of running out of storage space or experiencing performance degradation, providing stability for critical applications. - Simplified Management: Requires fewer processes and metadata to manage thick provisioned volumes and LUNs, streamlining administrative tasks.

With thick provisioning, you always know how much capacity you've used - whether the capacity is actually being used or not by the associated system. It does help to mitigate the issues with thin provisioning, but on the flip side it also adds more cost to the environment up front.

Not many drawbacks to thick provisioning outside of the upfront cost. You will also be allocating a lot of storage resources which may not be used for quite a while. This can prevent new systems from being deployed into that storage until more capacity is added further increasing the costs and decreasing ROI.