Is the maximum size of a file system going to change in ONTAP?
It was my understanding that the max size was limited by a few factors, among them the speed of disk reconstruction (max window of opportunity for duoble failure), the number of physical disks (in a scsi config) and something else.
With the advent of multiple raid groups and larger disk sizes, it seems like this might be the obvious progression. Lets say that the next drive size is 18GB. That means that in a 740 I could have 800GB* per loop. That would rock. (800GB when you have 4 raid groups with 12 (11+parity) disks + spares + shared disk for cluster)
I know that the argument will be that I should break up the single filesystem into multiple volumes, since then I can fine tune the options (snapshots, snap schedules, etc) per volume. That is all good, but when you start getting 100's of GB of data, sometimes it does not split cleanly (and updating the vfstab N clients becomes a chore, no matter how automated you have it (well, save for NIS, but who does that?)).
I don't need a 1.5TB filesystem.... yet. But it sure would be nice to be able to build one :)
Yes, the more we get the more we want.
Thanks.
Alexei