Dell EMC Unity™ Family Configuring NFS File Sharing

Thin provisioning best practices

The following general rules can help determine the best environments in which to use thin provisioning:

• Thin provisioning provides the benefit of space efficiency. It is recommended that you choose thin provisioning for a storage resource (selected by default), unless absolute and predictable performance is a higher requirement than space efficiency. In some workload environments, performance can actually improve with thin provisioning.
• Environments that can benefit from thin provisioning include:
  • Document repositories with rapidly rising capacity requirements. These repositories can benefit greatly from the improved capacity utilization offered by thin provisioning, provided their environments meet the previously outlined criteria.
  • Software development and source code repositories. These repositories are well-suited to thin provisioning, because their environments can usually tolerate some level of performance variability.
• Thin provisioning works best in file system environments where files are not frequently deleted. Many file systems do not efficiently reuse the space associated with deleted files, which can result in an allocated but unused space in the thin-provisioned file system.
• Consider the space consumption characteristics of databases before using thin provisioning. Some databases pre-allocate the storage space for data before writing to it. This space is allocated within a thin-provisioned storage resource, and this can reduce the capacity utilization within the pool. For more information, consult your database vendor documentation.