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E-Series Systems

What is Data Assurance?

Contributors netapp-jolieg netapp-driley netapp-jsnyder
PDFs

Data Assurance (DA) implements the T10 Protection Information (PI) standard, which increases data integrity by checking for and correcting errors that might occur as data is transferred along the I/O path.

The typical use of the Data Assurance feature will check the portion of the I/O path between the controllers and drives. DA capabilities are presented at the pool and volume group level.

When this feature is enabled, the storage array appends error-checking codes (also known as cyclic redundancy checks or CRCs) to each block of data in the volume. After a data block is moved, the storage array uses these CRC codes to determine if any errors occurred during transmission. Potentially corrupted data is neither written to disk nor returned to the host. If you want to use the DA feature, select a pool or volume group that is DA capable when you create a new volume (look for Yes next to DA in the pool and volume group candidates table).

Make sure you assign these DA-enabled volumes to a host using an I/O interface that is capable of DA. I/O interfaces that are capable of DA include Fibre Channel, SAS, iSCSI over TCP/IP, NVMe/FC, NVMe/IB, NVME/RoCE and iSER over InfiniBand (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA/ IB). DA is not supported by SRP over InfiniBand.