Storage Provisioning

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What Does Storage Provisioning Mean?

Storage provisioning is the process of assigning storage capacity to servers, computers, virtual machines or any other computing device. A broad term, storage provisioning incorporates manual and automated mechanisms used to allocate server storage space within a networked computing environment.

Techopedia Explains Storage Provisioning

Storage provisioning is implemented in a computing environment where the core storage resides in a storage area network (SAN) server. Storage may be provisioned to all connected devices – either manually, by the storage administrator, or automatically on runtime and on demand through a SAN software appliance.

The storage provisioning process requires careful planning on the front end. This helps the administrator or SAN software predict future storage requirements and optimize the underlying network for faster and more reliable data storage and retrieval.

Storage provisioning may be classified as fat provisioning or thin provisioning.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.