What is hitachi dynamic provisioning?
Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP)
Dynamic provisioning in Hitachi virtual storage platform(VSP) works on the concept of thin provisioning.
Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) was first introduced on the USP V/VM arrays. It provides a mechanism for grouping multiple RAID Groups of the same RAID type and same disk type into a single pool which is the DP pool. Dynamic Provisioning Volumes (DPVOLs) can be created with specified logical size (up to 60TB) on the DP pool and present it to the host.
The host(server) accesses the DPVOL as if it is a normal volume. A primary difference is that physical space is not allocated to a DPVOL until the host starts writes at the DPVOL. Whenever a host starts writing data in DPVOL (Thin Vol), data is written into DP Pool and stripes across RAID groups in stripes. The stripe size is 42MB.
By using dynamic provisioning we can eliminate the allocated but unused space in the storage system. Dynamic provisioning allows the efficiently allocate storage to hosts. It is more efficient than traditional provisioning.
Advantages of dynamic provisioning
- It dynamically manages data and physical capacity without frequent manual involvement
- Provides balanced resources and more optimized performance
- allows creating larger sized volumes
- Simplifies storage management
