Thin Provisioning vs Thick Provisioning Explained

Thick Provisioning or Fat Provisioning:

With the Thick or Fat Provisioning, when a drive is created for a user or host, the entire space quota of the user/host is allocated right away to the user/host. Let us say, your organization gives you a 100GB storage space, 100 GB of sectors on the tracks of the hard drive, or the volume is immediately allocated to you. Imagine, let’s say, there are about 100 users in your organization, the company has to purchase the entire physical storage space/Hard Disks to provide 100GB of space to each user. In this case, even if the user is using only about 10GB of space, he would still be allocated 100GB. This method creates an unnecessary financial overhead.

Thin Provisioning:

Thin Provisioning, allows the administrators to create quotas or volume space for the user without actually having space physically and later adding more storage space. This method is very effective for virtualized environments. Additionally, the unused space on the storage medium can be more effectively utilized when compared to the Thick Provisioning.

Let us say your organization has 100 employees and each of them is required to be allocated with 100 GB of storage space, the actual total space required is 10TB. With the Thin Provisioning model, the administrator can virtually assign 100GB to each user, with only 2TB of actual physical storage space, and physically add more space on the fly to the volumes as to the demand for space increases. This method can effectively reduce the procurement costs of the physical drives.