What is thin provisioning and how does it benefit storage administration?

• A. It pre-allocates all space upfront for volumes to prevent over-commitment.
• B. It stores data in compressed form on disk.
• C. It allows volumes to be created with a maximum size but allocate space on demand, improving efficiency and utilization.
• D. It duplicates data across volumes to improve performance.

Answer: (C)

Thin provisioning means you present a volume with a defined maximum size to hosts, but you only allocate the actual physical storage when data is written. This allows you to over-commit storage, giving a larger logical capacity than what’s physically on hand and allocating blocks on demand. The big benefit is improved efficiency and utilization: you don’t reserve disk space for data that doesn’t exist yet, so storage can grow as needed without huge upfront purchases. This speeds up provisioning and lowers initial hardware costs, which is especially helpful when managing many volumes or variable workloads. Just keep in mind you’ll need monitoring and controls (alerts, quotas) to prevent running out of physical storage if usage spikes. The other options describe different techniques—pre-allocating space is thick provisioning, compression changes how data is stored, and data duplication affects performance or resilience rather than how storage is allocated.