Storage Efficiency Feature NetApp Cluster Mode

Storage Efficiency Feature NetApp Cluster Mode 

What is Storage Efficiency

Storage efficiency features ensure that there is no wastage of storage capacity and all disk capacity is used in efficient manner without impacting performance. It lowers operation cost.

Storage Administrator has to manage it by enabling and monitoring various storage efficiency feature.

Types Of Storage Efficiency In NetApp Cluster Mode

There are four types Storage efficiency features available in NetApp cluster mode.

• De-Duplication
• Thin Provisioning
• Compression
• FlexClone

Storage Efficiency Feature De-Duplication

De-duplication reduces the amount of physical storage required for a volume by discarding duplicate blocks and updating the pointer to refer to a single block.

A common example where deduplication is useful is Mail attachment. Same mail attachment is stored by many user which consumes lot of space.

During normal data writing process each data block is assigned with a unique signature. When De-duplication process starts Data Ontap compares these signature and removes all data block which has same signature and keeps only one data block for reference.

Then Data Ontap updates the pointer to the single data blocks. In this way many data blocks is reclaimed and storage efficiency to store same data increases.

Storage Efficiency Feature Thin-Provisioning

A thin-provisioned volume or LUN is one for which storage is not reserved in advance. Instead, storage is allocated dynamically, as it is needed. It means when user starts putting data in volume actual space is allocated to volume from its containing aggregate.

Free space is released back to the storage system when data in the volume or LUN is deleted.

Thin Provisioning support over provisioning. Example for 5 TB of aggregate you can allocate 7 TB of volumes. As not every user uses all storage that is assigned to them.

Storage Efficiency Feature Compression

Compression reduces the amount of physical storage required for a volume by combining data blocks in compression groups. Then each of these compression groups is stored as a single block.

There are two types of compression:

Inline Compression – Compression happens in memory before the data is written to disk.
Post Compression – Compression happens after the data is written to the disk.

Storage Efficiency Feature FlexClone

FlexClone technology references Snapshot metadata to create writable, point-in-time copies of a volume. Flexclone Copies share data blocks with their parents, hence it does not consumes any extra storage.

You can split the FlexClone to separate it from its parent volume. Once split operation is done the volume will start consumes extra space from aggregate. Watch this video to know more about Flexclone.

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