About reclaiming thin storage
Thin provisioning and thin reclamation are techniques to achieve efficient storage utilization. Thin provisioning refers to a technique of improving storage utilization by only allocating to a volume the physical storage required to hold its data. With thin provisioning, the storage administrator allocates logical storage to an application. The system releases the physical capacity only when the data is written. However, when the data is deleted from the file system, the physical capacity remains allocated even though it is no longer used. To ensure that your thin storage environment stays thin, you can reclaim this unused space.
You can use InfoScale Operations Manager to reclaim thin storage and to view the reclaimed physical storage space after the reclamation process is completed.
To reclaim thin storage requires managed hosts with a supported Storage Foundation version. Thin reclamation is supported on the following Storage Foundation versions:
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UNIX/Linux: 7.4.2 or later
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Windows: 7.4.2 or later
In addition, the storage must meet the following requirements:
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The storage must be visible to Storage Foundation as thin reclaimable.
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For UNIX/Linux: The LUNs must be a part of a Storage Foundation volume which has a mounted VxFS file system.
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For Windows: The LUNs must be a part of a Storage Foundation for Windows dynamic volume which has a mounted NTFS file system.
You can configure thin reclamation in the context of different objects that are discovered by InfoScale Operations Manager:
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Server perspective: Lets you select multiple file systems or disks for a selected host and perform thin reclamation. The associated LUNs are reclaimed. You can run a report to identify file systems and hosts that are potential candidates for thin reclamation.
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