Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Storage (general) > Dell PowerScale: Considerations and Best Practices for Large Clusters > Configuring storage quotas
One of the most useful of the OneFS data services for capacity allocation and management in large clusters is SmartQuotas. Quotas enable administrators to understand, predict, control and limit storage usage, and provision a cluster to best meet their storage needs. Furthermore, a default quota can be set on a top-level directory and be automatically inherited by subdirectories. This is ideal for automated home directory quota management across enterprises with large employee headcounts.
Quotas also facilitate ‘thin provisioning’, or the ability to present more storage capacity to applications and users than is physically present (over-provisioning). This allows for metered purchasing and provisioning of storage as the cluster grows, rather than having to make large, speculative purchasing decisions ahead of time. Here are a couple of examples of leveraging SmartQuotas in large cluster environments: