Richard, That's an interesting question, if it's worth it or not. I guess the question is always who are the targets for ZFS (I assume everyone, though in reality priorities has to set up as the developer resources are limited). For a home office, no doubt thin provisioning is not much of a use, for an enterprise company the numbers might really make a difference if we look at the space used vs space allocated.
There are some studies that thin provisioning can reduce physical space used up to 30%, which is huge. (Even though I understands studies are not real life and thin provisioning is not viable in every environment) Btw, I would like to discuss scenarios where though we have over-subscribed pool in the SAN (meaning the overall allocated space to the systems is more than the physical space in the pool) with proper monitoring and proactive physical drive adds we won't let any systems/applications attached to the SAN realize that we have thin devices. Actually that's why I believe configuring thin devices without periodically reclaiming space is just a timebomb, though if you have the option to periodically reclaim space, you can maintain the pool in the SAN in a really efficient way. That's why I found Veritas' Thin Reclamation API as a milestone in the thin device field. Anyway, only future can tell if thin provisioning will or won't be a major feature in the storage world, though as I saw Veritas already added this feature I was wondering if ZFS has it at least on it's roadmap. Regards, sendai -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
