Ever-increasing storage demands have a negative effect on an organization’s IT budget and complicate the overall storage infrastructure and management. Companies are looking at ways to use their storage resources more efficiently.

Thin provisioning can help by reducing the amount of unused storage that is typically allocated to applications or users. Available for the IBM DS8000 for Fixed Block and Count Key Data (CKD) volumes, thin provisioning defers the allocation of actual space on the storage system until the time that the data must effectively be written to disk.

This IBM Redpaper™ publication provides an overall understanding of how thin provisioning works on the IBM DS8000. It also provides insights into the functional design and its implementation on the DS8900F and includes illustrations for the configuration of thin-provisioned volumes from the DS GUI or the DS CLI.

This edition applies to DS8900F Release 9.3 or later, yet with many aspects it is also usable with previous code levels or hardware generations.

Chapter 1. Thin provisioning

Chapter 2. Planning considerations and guidelines

Chapter 3. Space-efficient volumes in the DS8000

Chapter 4. DS GUI and DS CLI support for thin provisioning

Chapter 5. Managing and monitoring thin-provisioned volumes

Chapter 6. Use of thin-provisioned volumes in IBM Z