Provisioning, say what?
Marc, I just love the concept of provisioning, er, at least I'm sure I would if I knew what the heck it means!

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Provisioning is the process of securing end-to-end connections for a network. In telecom it means finding network links from whatever assortment of service providers there are to build the necessary point-to-point connections.

In storage networks there are not multiple vendors, but there might be multiple paths that could be taken. If a primary path fails, what can be done to reroute a prioritized connection over another set of resources. Furthermore, how is that route changed to minimize whatever downtime might occur? It's certainly related to HA and pathing stuff, but it implies more of an expert system that traditional dual path configurations.

Hope this helps, it helped me.

Regards,
Marc Farley

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This was first published in January 2002