However I believe it’s a lot like airlines overselling flights, a practice I always thought should be indictable. If you sell more than you have in just about any other industry, it’s called fraud.

But you’re right, it’s been around for years, the Celerra has done it for as long as I can remember, and I suppose it’s common industry practice.

Although I see a lot less risk doing it in a NAS device than with a block-level device. There is too much risk to data on a block-level device when you get to a point where there is no more space to be had..

Now, considering that it took experience (read: falling flat on your face) for web hostings companies to weigh up the right ratios or formula to avoid embarrassment and understand what overselling really meant, I think the real question is how good is the reporting on thin provisioning use?

If the reports are useless, well, you know what happens in 3 mths time when Finance or the Dev team keep asking for VMs/space

But, if you give them space, plus what they LIKELY will need in the future, you have just wasted terabytes of space! Solution? Thin provisioning. I give them 12 gig disks, they won’t run out of room anytime soon, if ever(we use network shares for file storage), but only 3 gigs is used on the vast majority of the volumes. My waste has been trimmed by nearly 100%.

This is only one example, there are plenty of them around, but looking at it logically, you can see where it fits.

But otherwise I really wouldn’t use it for anyting else. I don’t like the idea of over subscribing- but for the base OS, I think it’s a good idea.

Pat