Storage and performance requirements

You must understand the storage and performance requirements for StorageGRID nodes hosted by virtual machines, so you can provide enough space to support the initial configuration and future storage expansion.

Performance requirements

The performance of the OS volume and of the first storage volume significantly impacts the overall performance of the system. Ensure that these provide adequate disk performance in terms of latency, input/output operations per second (IOPS), and throughput.

All StorageGRID nodes require that the OS drive and all storage volumes have write-back caching enabled. The cache must be on a protected or persistent media.

Requirements for virtual machines that use NetApp AFF storage

If a StorageGRID node is deployed in a virtual machine with storage assigned from a NetApp AFF system, confirm that the volume does not have a FabricPool tiering policy enabled. Disabling FabricPool tiering for volumes used with StorageGRID nodes simplifies troubleshooting and storage operations.

Attention: Never use FabricPool to tier any data related to StorageGRID back to StorageGRID itself. Tiering StorageGRID data back to StorageGRID increases troubleshooting and operational complexity.

Number of virtual machines required

Each StorageGRID site requires a minimum of three Storage Nodes.

Attention: In a production deployment, do not run more than one Storage Node on a single virtual machine server. Using a dedicated virtual machine host for each Storage Node provides an isolated failure domain.

Other types of nodes, such as Admin Nodes or Gateway Nodes, can be deployed on the same virtual machine host, or they can be deployed on their own dedicated virtual machine hosts as required. However, if you have multiple nodes of the same type (two Gateway Nodes, for example), do not install all instances on the same virtual machine host.

Storage requirements for all nodes

StorageGRID is a distributed system composed of multiple nodes working with each other. Do not use disk snapshots to restore grid nodes. Instead, refer to the recovery and maintenance procedures for each type of node.

Storage requirements for Storage Nodes

A software-based Storage Node can have 1 to 16 storage volumes; however, 3 or more storage volumes are recommended. Each storage volume should be 4 TB or larger.

Note: An appliance Storage Node can have up to 48 storage volumes.

You must assign at least 4 TB to volume 0 of each Storage Node. StorageGRID reserves up to 4 TB of space on volume 0 (the Metadata Reserved Space, or CAWM) for object metadata and for essential database operations, such as compaction and repair.

If you assign additional space to volume 0, that space is used for object storage. Assigning more than 4 TB to volume 0 is recommended.

Note: If you use only one storage volume for a Storage Node and you assign 4 TB or less to the volume, the Storage Node might enter the Storage Read-Only state on startup and store object metadata only.

Note: If you assign less than 500 GB to volume 0 (non-production use only), 10% of the storage volume's capacity is reserved for metadata.