I have storage that allows me to thin provision my volumes presented to the clients. Is this safe? What are the best practices?
How to safely use storage thin provisioning
storagethin-provisioning
storagethin-provisioning
I have storage that allows me to thin provision my volumes presented to the clients. Is this safe? What are the best practices?
Best Answer
Generically, whether you're talking about SCSI LUNs (SAN) or network file systems (NAS), thin provisioned storage is when you tell the storage client that it has more space than you've actually allocated to it. This has no risks on its own, but if you don't have enough actual storage to allow every single container to grow to the full promised size, that's called overprovisioning and it entails risk.
Advantages
The advantages of overprovisioning and thin provisioning are compelling. Many consumers of storage (servers, file share users, etc.) will request far more storage than they initially need, and continue to ensure they have a safe margin for growth as they grow. A centrally provisioned safe margin for growth is far more efficient than hundreds of small ones. The utilization of the underlying storage without thin/overprovisioning can be very low, and this allows a higher rate of utilization.
Risks
All the risks of this scenario are linked with overprovisioning. The more you overprovision, the higher your risk. The danger is the potential for the utilization of storage resources to completely fill the available storage, which will generally cause all the storage containers to fail in one way or another. Filesystems will go read only or offline and LUNs will go offline.
Best practice
In order to get the benefits of higher utilization that come with overprovisioning while mitigating the risk, you need to constantly monitor the storage and be able to take action when required.