A friendly NetApp person recently shared this document with me. It basically is a cheat sheet for common ONTAP commands and best practices. (Data ONTAP is NetApp’s operating system for their filers.)
One of the things I particularly liked was the chart named “Disk right-size and max disk per aggregate matrix” on page 8. This is exactly what we have been struggling with on our new FAS3140’s. It’s not clear to me (as a relative NetApp newbie) how many disks to properly build RAID groups and aggregates with. NetApp says that optimal RAID group size uses the least amount of parity drives, has the most data disks, and doesn’t not harm performance by creating short RAID groups. However, they usually don’t come right out and plainly tell you how many disks of what size should make up a RAID group and aggregate. This chart makes it a snap. (Click here or on the image below to go to the PDF…)
Nice one! Even for users that aren’t familiar with ONTAP.
really helpfull stuff.
Thanks… exactly what I was looking for!
Thanks… Nice Document and its very useful
Perfect! There should be more tips like this 🙂
Thanks for Sharing.
Note that this is out of date. I only see 1-TB drives with a max aggregate of 20TB. With the 4-TB drives now shipping, and with 64-bit aggregates, you need to seek more current info before slicing and dicing your storage.
A “sub-optimal” 2x 8+2 RAID-DP with 4TB drives is still only 20 drives, but yields an aggregate over 52TB usable.