Two things I want in ONTAP

NetApp’s feature set in ONTAP is pretty awesome, especially when you consider all the extra bits you can license. But there’s a few bits of base functionality I’d like to see improved, now that my biggest request (QoS-ish volume prioritization) is well on the way to being satisfied:

  1. Lift the 16TB size limitation on aggregates. With 500GB (and soon 750GB!) SATA drives 16TB is really starting to uncomfortably limit the number of spindles I can put in an aggregate. It’s sounds bizarre to utter this phrase out loud, but in this day and age 16TB just isn’t big enough! I have too many aggregates to manage! Help!
  2. Transparent WAFL compression. All of my testing with ZFS to date has indicated that in many environments I find myself involved with, this would be both a performance and a capacity win. Enabling extra “goodies” like free compression, BTW, is one of the reasons why I’ve long argued that filers don’t have fast enough CPUs in them. You can never have fast enough CPUs! My guess is that the FAS6000s should have enough “oomph” to do this without breaking a sweat for most workloads. FAS3050s might have trouble keeping up to their current throughput numbers, but perhaps with the help of a TOE card they could come close in the streaming scenario, and handiy beat a non-compressed WAFL on all other (i.e. more random) workloads. Of course, the FAS6000s could also benefit from TOE cards, especially now that we’re entering the 10GBit era.

If I go down to NetApp HQ this year, these are the two features I’ll be lobbying for everytime I have someone’s ear. :)

What’s your biggest feature request for ONTAP?

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Published:
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Author:
mark
Category:
netapp, storage, sysadmin