On Thu, 27 May 2010, John Stoffel wrote: > Please share! Absolutely!
> That might work, but the real advantage we perceived was being able to > get around/away from the 16Tb volume limitations of Netapp, which > would let us simplify the data paths users used to access stuff, and > let us grow large projects without having to shuffle data around by > hand and update where it was. Yeah, NetApp has always had scaling issues, but that's getting better. The newer filers can run OnTAP 8 in full 64 bit, which will give us up to 100TB aggregates, finally (still depends on the hardware platform, unfortunately)! > Basically, that's what you can have the Acopia do, which is assign a > single virtual mount point to one or more backend storage pools. > Acopia manages them transparently to the end users. Yeah, I don't think we really want that. Our shares are relatively small, but there are a bunch (I'm thinking things like home shares for end users, too). If I can just move that share around various volumes/aggregates/filers without affecting that end user, great, but I still have to understand how Acopia handles that vs. using the filer itself. > One goal was to make refreshes of our Netapps transparent to end > users, but that didn't work out really. Basically, you have to take > the downtime to put the Acopia in front of the storage, then take > downtime again if you need to remove the acopia to do another site or > set of volumes. Yeah, that wouldn't be really effective here either. > Now moving onto Netapp, I really really really wish they'd let me > create a single Aggregate that spanned all the disks in a Filer, so I > can create as many volumes as I want, which can grow/shrink easily. Me too. It's really a limitation of what WAFL can handle, but with the newer faster processors, they're starting to finally lift some of those limits, or at least expand them. > Right now we have to balance volumes across aggregates, and if you > guess wrong... it's a complete hassle to move data, even if you have > Tb free on another aggregate. See, I hoped that the Acopia would help with that by keeping the namespace at the front end, allowing me to move the files and just tell the Acopia box to route the traffic to the new location. > I'd be happier with 16Tb volumes, if I could just have them all > mounted on a 64Tb aggregate without hassles. Real Soon Now(tm)! -Adam _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
