I’d expect you’re right… actual single aggregates of 100GB sound unlikely to be.

However, don’t write off striped volumes due to MDV bottlenecks. That issue is likely to go away in the future.

Snapmirror a striped volume, you’d imagine Netapp would be working on fixing that issue in a release of OnTAP 8 too.

Darren

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Douglas Siggins
Sent: 02 June 2009 21:52
To: Stephen C. Losen; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: Bigger Aggregates (was Re: HSM/ILM for Netapp)

Greetings,
Seems like someone is hearing more rumors than I about DOT 8.0. I assume this feature you are speaking of will be very similar to the "striped volume" feature on GX, and not a true 100T volume

Don't keep your hopes too high. The bottleneck ends up being the MDV -- essentially another volume that keeps the metadata for the striped volumes. I also don't believe we have the ability in GX to snapmirror (or volume mirror) a striped volume.

Did you hear this information from a sales person?

Regards,
Douglas Siggins



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Stephen C. Losen
Sent: Tue 6/2/2009 4:32 PM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Bigger Aggregates (was Re: HSM/ILM for Netapp)

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 6/2/09 1:34 PM, Page, Jeremy wrote:
> > I thought they where planning to move to 100TB volumes in the very near
> > future (7.4?)
>
> DOT 8.0 is supposedly bringing WAFL improvements to allow for 100TB
> aggrs/vols (rumored to be dropping this summer).
>
> I also hear jumping any 7.x variant to 8.0 will be a disruptive upgrade.
>
> Cheers.
>
> - --
> Nick Silkey
>

I would really, really, really like to see a utility in DOT 8.x
where one aggregate can "assimilate" another aggregate.  In other
words I want to combine aggrA and aggrB into a new aggrA that
contains all of the raid groups (and volumes) of the two aggregates,
with aggrB disappearing.

I don't see why this would be difficult to do.  Just move the raid
groups (and hence volumes) from aggrB to aggrA.  I understand that
there need to be restrictions (all RGs need to have the same raid
type, and no mixing of FC and SATA disks, etc.)  Anything to avoid
massive data copies.  It would even be fine if this had to be done
from a maintenance boot.

Right now I have 11 identical 10T aggregates on my snapmirror destination
filer (Each consists of 1 raid-dp RG of 16 1TB SATA disks.  I would have
built slightly smaller RGs, but the 16T limit made that too wasteful.)
It's a pain to figure out where to snapmirror a new source volume, since
everyone seems to want at least 5T volumes now. I occasionally need to
reshuffle to make room.  I would LOVE to be able combine all these "little"
10T aggrs into one or two bigger aggrs.

I also hope they set the limit way bigger than 100T, which seems like
just kicking the can down the road to me.

Steve Losen   scl@virginia.edu    phone: 434-924-0640

University of Virginia               ITC Unix Support

To report this email as spam click here.