Storage provisioning best practices

Storage provisioning is a complicated, and mostly manual, labor-intensive task. Each vendor has its proprietary tools and recommended approach. And, the task keeps getting harder due to the increasing complexity of enterprise storage environments.

Storage provisioning information Disk arrays overview Tech Report: SRM Is storage automation right for you?

Storage provisioning is the process of logically carving up physical disk space to meet an organization's need for storage capacity, performance, security and efficiency. It encompasses the assignment of servers/hosts to appropriate storage, specifying network paths between hosts and storage, and masking servers and zoning the network to ensure access by the right servers. The entire task involves dozens of individual steps.

Below is a list of eight storage provisioning best practices that will help you to boost performance and disk utilization.

1. Establish an orderly storage requisition procedure
2. Collect all pertinent information at the outset
3. Enforce change management policies throughout the process
4. Organize and manage provisioning as a coordinated team effort
5. Manage communications among the team
6. Identify the provisioning constraints of your devices
7. Concatenate LUNs for flexibility
8. Use soft zoning worldwide name based

This storage provisioning tip first appeared in Storage magazine's October 2006 issue.

Alan Radding is a frequent contributer to "Storage" magazine.

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