We started out with a self-imposed 400GB volume limit, and are now increasing it to 600GB to accomodate our data growth. I find small volumes to be unweildly, especially if your data grows at an alarming rate like ours - it robs the NetApp of some of it's flexibility. Backup tape speeds and capacities are increasing, and larger volumes should become easier to backup and restore. That said, I'm curious about your fragmentation comment. How does that express itself, in performance degradation? For simple budgetary reasons, I almost never get to add 3-5 disks at a time to any of my file systems.
Moshe
Jeff Kennedy wrote:
Brian,
I have 3 volumes over 300gb and one that is 600gb. The only problem I have is that it (the 600gb volume) is now fragmented from the way we added disks (add in groups of AT LEAST 3, preferably 5). Otherwise, backups finish in under 24 hours so daily fulls are possible if that's your schedule. And that's to 1 tape drive, if you have several and break it out by qtree it would be done in much less time. Restores are a different animal....
~JK
"Brian L. Brush" wrote:
We have an F760 with two shelves of 72 GB drives. There are two volumes of five drives each. We now face the decision to expand one of the volumes or create a new three-drive volume, leaving one hot spare.
If we create a new volume, we lose yet another large chunk of space for parity. (We also get a small number of spindles, but performance hasn't proven to be a problem in our situation.)
If we expand an existing volume, we get an uncomfortably large volume. The volumes are already 215 GB.
We're leaning toward the latter resolution, because disk usage inexorably increases, and purchasing more hardware is not an option even on the horizon.
How have others dealt with these matters? Do such large volumes entail problems beyond the obviously longer backup and restore times? Are we overlooking any major issues?
--Brian L. Brush Senior Systems Administrator Paradyne Corporation
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Jeff Kennedy Unix Administrator AMCC jlkennedy@amcc.com