System and method for pre-provisioning data storage in a network storage environment. Embodiments may pre-provision more storage than needed and make the spare storage available to two or more hosts in the storage network. Spare storage may be pre-provisioned as part of a pool or pools, and any one of the hosts on the storage network may claim spare storage out of the pool(s) to which it has access on an as-needed basis. Embodiments remove the data center's change control process from the critical path in provisioning additional storage, and do not result in the generation of I/O errors on writes to storage if the pool of spare storage available to a host is exhausted. In one embodiment, a coordinating service on the storage network may coordinate access to the pool of spare storage by the hosts on the storage network.