SANtricity 11 Manuals (CA08872-010)

Resource provisioning is a feature available in the AB3100 and AB6100 storage systems, which allows volumes to be put in use immediately with no background initialization process. All drive blocks assigned to the volume are deallocated (unmapped), which can improve SSD wear life and increase maximum write performance.

By default, resource provisioning is enabled on systems where the drives support DULBE. There is no need to enable resource provisioning unless you have previously disabled it.

When you enable resource provisioning for existing volume groups and pools, all volumes in the selected volume group or pool are changed to allow the blocks to be deallocated. This process might involve a background operation to ensure consistent allocation at the unmap granularity. This operation does not unmap any space. Once the background operation completes, the operating system needs to unmap any unused blocks to create free space.

When you disable resource provisioning for existing volume groups or pools, a background operation rewrites all the logical blocks in every volume. Existing data remains intact. The writes will map or provision the blocks on the drives associated with the volume group or pool.