Storage consolidation is an accepted best practice because it enables organizations to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and simplify management. An obvious benefit of consolidation is storage capacity utilization. A less commonly discussed topic is how to ensure that consolidation does not cause performance issues: underutilization or overutilization of hardware resources, especially as workloads change and grow over time. To avoid performance utilization problems administrators should provision storage so that loads are balanced across resources evenly.