Jeffrey Krueger wrote:
- Shrink-able volumes. It isn't impossible, its just not easy. =)
This is something I would *really* like. You don't need it often, but when you do...
I have a filer with a volume > 1.5TB that I can't upgrade because volumes > 1.5TB cause a halt on boot in the latest versions of ONTap. (By my counting the volume was 1.33TB, but NetApp didn't mention before that it was counting raw sizes including parity disks.)
There could be two methods for removing disk: A) Removing 1 disk or B) Removing entire raid group. Removing an entire raid group might be simpler, but it could require a few spare disk (you might have to grow a volume before you had space to remove an entire raid group).
It seems to me that shrinking volumes by removing 1 disk could be done by a 6 stage process: 1) Mark the last drive in the volume as full (i.e. Read Only) 2) Find files with data on that disk 3) Rewrite those files (this could be done by clients rather than the filer) 4) Wait for snapshots with data on this disk to be deleted. 5) Write zeros to the data area of the disk (to ensure the parity is correct after removal) 6) Final tidy up and marking disk as spare.
This could all take some time, but a process that takes a week would be much better than 5 days downtime while I backup and restore my data.
Is NetApp likely to be able to shrink volumes in the near future?
- Bruce
-- Bruce Arden arden@nortel.com Nortel, London Rd, Harlow, England +44 1279 40 2877