Space Management

The array OS has built-in capacity saving mechanisms such as inline compression and thin provisioning. The following considerations help you plan your space configuration for volumes and snapshots.

The simplest form of space management is to not use reserves at all. This means that there is no dedicated (prereserved) space per volume taken from the general storage pool, so all volumes can consume what they need as it is needed. This method requires that you monitor space usage to ensure that there is always space available.

However, for critical volumes, such as those hosting business-critical data, it may be more important for you to reserve space to ensure that the volume will always have enough. Reserved space is immediately taken from the storage pool.

When you create a volume, you define a certain amount of space for that volume. The volume space is the size that is reported to your application.