Complimentary Strategies; Thin Provisioning; Thin Provisioning Z Concepts - HP XP7 User Manual

Resource groups should be planned and created before creating volumes. For more information,
see "Configuring resource groups" (page

Complimentary strategies

Functions related to provisioning
For the following functions, see the appropriate manuals:
Replication: Business Copy Z, Continuous Access Synchronous Z, Continuous Access Journal
Z, Compatible XRC, Compatible FlashCopy
External storage: External Storage
Partitioning: Cache Partition (HP XP7 Performance for Open and Mainframe Systems User
Guide)
TSE-VOL: Compatible FlashCopy SE
NOTE: For information on program products that can perform operations on volumes that connect
with zLinux, contact HP technical support.

Thin Provisioning

About Thin Provisioning Z
Though basic or traditional provisioning strategies can be appropriate and useful in specific
scenarios, they can be expensive to set up, awkward and time consuming to configure, difficult to
monitor, and error prone when maintaining storage.
Although Thin Provisioning Z requires some additional setup steps, it is a simpler alternative to the
traditional provisioning methods. Thin Provisioning Z allows you to reserve virtual storage capacity
based on anticipated future capacity needs, using virtual volumes instead of physical disk capacity.
Overall storage use rates might improve because you can potentially provide more virtual capacity
to applications while using fewer physical disks. It can provide lower initial cost, greater efficiency,
and storage management freedom for storage administrators. In this way, Thin Provisioning Z
software:
Simplifies storage management
Provides a better balance of resources and optimization of performance by default than Basic
provisioning.
Optimizes physical disk usage
Can reduce device address requirements over traditional provisioning by providing larger
volume sizes.

Thin Provisioning Z concepts

Thin Provisioning Z is a volume management feature that allows storage managers and system
programmers to efficiently plan and allocate storage to users or applications. It provides a platform
for the array to dynamically manage data and physical capacity without frequent manual
involvement.
Thin Provisioning Z provides three important capabilities: as-needed provisioning of storage,
enhanced default volume performance, and larger volume sizes.
Thin Provisioning Z is more efficient than traditional provisioning strategies. It is implemented by
creating one or more Thin Provisioning Z pools (THP pools) of physical storage space using multiple
LDEVs. Then, you can establish virtual THP volumes (THP V-VOLs) and associate them to the individual
THP pools. In this way, capacity to support data can be optimally assigned on demand within the
pool.
20).
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