A technique to provision an OS image during a boot-up of a computing
server in a utility computing environment using disk array's inherent raw
concurrent multi-disk copy mechanism. In one example embodiment, this is
achieved by forming a pool of OS image boot-up disks in a disk array
using the disk array's internal disk copy routine. An OS image boot-up
disk is assigned from the pool of OS image boot-up disks to the computing
server upon receiving a request from the computing server. The OS image
is then received from the assigned OS image boot-up disk. The computing
server then boots-up using the received OS image and runs one or more
applications residing in the computing server.