Patent ID: 8578087

Claim:
A computer program product to concurrently convert a standard volume to a thin-provisioned volume, the computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having computer-usable program code embodied therein, the computer-usable program code comprising: computer-usable program code to create, on storage devices hosting a standard volume, metadata for a thin-provisioned volume; computer-usable program code to update the metadata for the thin-provisioned volume to point to extents residing in a standard volume; computer-usable program code to suspend I/O to metadata for the standard volume; computer-usable program code to migrate control of the extents from a standard-volume control algorithm to a thin-provisioned-volume control algorithm without physically moving or migrating data in the extents; computer-usable program code to resume the I/O to the metadata for the thin-provisioned volume; computer-usable program code to scan the thin-provisioned volume for any extents that contain all zeroes (hereinafter “zeroed extents”); and computer-usable program code to remove the zeroed extents from the thin-provisioned volume.