A method, system, apparatus, and computer-readable medium are provided for dynamically provisioning available space in a data storage system without having to configure partitions at system startup. According to one method, a system table is maintained that includes entries corresponding to provisions within the available physical capacity of a data storage system. A volume table is also maintained that includes entries corresponding to territories within a logical data storage volume. When a data write operation is requested, a determination is made as to whether physical space has been allocated for the territory in the volume that is to be written. If physical space has not yet been allocated, the necessary physical space is allocated for the territory within the logical volume that is to receive the written data by creating a pointer to an available entry in the system table in an entry in the volume table corresponding to the territory to be written. Once the physical space has been allocated, the requested write operation is performed. Metadata is written to disk in a fashion that makes it easy to recover from system crashes and unclean shutdowns.