Q. XIV thin provisioning is automatic?. i have assigned a 100 GB space. If the disk is used 90 GB, the hard space will increased automatically?. If the space is increased automatically, how much capacity will it add to existing hard size?.
A. The idea behind thin provisioning is that you can allocate a large amount of logical storage to a volume, but not use the real storage until the application writes new data to the volume. The XIV along with other systems that support thin provisioning will monitor the use of logical and real storage for volumes, and issue alerts when any threshold is reached. This saves having to monitor a number of volumes constantly to resize the space, or (more commonly) avoid the over-allocation of storage to a volume which is never used.
A volume can be thin provisioned or not. Either way when the limit of a volume is reached as in the case in the question, the volume has to be resized. As the XIV is virtualized, this is easier on the XIV, as the additional space required is taken from the un-allocated storage from all the disks (avoiding the problem of finding contiguous space for the resized volume and often having to copy the volume). However, my understanding is that it is not automatic on the XIV, although scripts can be used to automate this function. The screen required to perform this administrative task is shown in this link.
David Floyer CTO Wikibon
