HP XP P9000 Provisioning for Mainframe Systems User Guide

Virtual LVI software is used to configure custom-sized provisioning. For detailed information, see
“Configuring custom-sized provisioning” (page 34).
Thin Provisioning Overview
Thin provisioning is an approach to managing storage that maximizes physical storage capacity.
Instead of reserving a fixed amount of storage for a volume, it simply assigns capacity from the
available physical pool when data is actually written to disk.
Thin provisioning includes:
• “Thin Provisioning Z concepts ” (page 13)
Thin Provisioning Z
Though basic or traditional provisioning strategies can be appropriate and useful in specific
scenarios, they can be expensive to set up, awkward and time consuming to configure, difficult to
monitor, and error prone when maintaining storage.
Although Thin Provisioning Z requires some additional steps, it is a simpler alternative to the
traditional provisioning methods. It uses thin provisioning technology that allows you to allocate
virtual storage capacity based on anticipated future capacity needs, using virtual volumes instead
of physical disk capacity.
Overall storage use rates may improve because you can potentially provide more virtual capacity
to applications while using fewer physical disks. It can provide lower initial cost, greater efficiency,
and storage management freedom for storage administrators. In this way, Thin Provisioning Z
software:
• Simplifies storage management
• Provides balanced resources and more optimized performance by default without manual
intervention.
• Maximizes physical disk usage
Thin Provisioning Z concepts
Thin Provisioning Z is a volume management feature that allows storage managers and system
programmers to efficiently plan and allocate storage to users or applications. It provides a platform
for the array to dynamically manage data and physical capacity without frequent manual
involvement.
Thin Provisioning Z provides two important capabilities: thin provisioning of storage and enhanced
default volume performance.
Thin Provisioning Z is more efficient than traditional provisioning strategies. It is implemented by
creating one or more Thin Provisioning Z pools (THP pools) of physical storage space using multiple
Thin Provisioning Overview 13