Skip to main content
NetApp solutions for SAP

Storage controller setup

Contributors netapp-mschoen
PDFs

This section describes the configuration of the NetApp storage system. You must complete the primary installation and setup according to the corresponding Data ONTAP setup and configuration guides.

Storage efficiency

Inline deduplication, cross-volume inline deduplication, inline compression, and inline compaction are supported with SAP HANA in an SSD configuration.

Quality of Service

QoS can be used to limit the storage throughput for specific SAP HANA systems or non-SAP applications on a shared controller.

Production and Dev/Test

One use case would be to limit the throughput of development and test systems so that they cannot influence production systems in a mixed setup.
During the sizing process, you should determine the performance requirements of a nonproduction system. Development and test systems can be sized with lower performance values, typically in the range of 20% to 50% of a production-system KPI as defined by SAP.
Large write I/O has the biggest performance effect on the storage system. Therefore, the QoS throughput limit should be set to a percentage of the corresponding write SAP HANA storage performance KPI values in the data and log volumes.

Shared Environments

Another use case is to limit the throughput of heavy write workloads, especially to avoid that these workloads have an impact on other latency sensitive write workloads.
In such environments it is best practice to apply a non-shared throughput ceiling QoS group-policy to each LUN within each Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) to restrict the max throughput of each individual storage object to the given value. This reduces the possibility that a single workload can negatively influence other workloads.

To do so, a group-policy needs to be created using the CLI of the ONTAP cluster for each SVM:

qos policy-group create -policy-group <policy-name> -vserver <vserver name> -max-throughput 1000MB/s -is-shared false

and applied to each LUN within the SVM. Below is an example to apply the policy group to all existing LUNs within an SVM:

lun modify -vserver <vserver name>  -path * -qos-policy-group  <policy-name>

This needs to be done for every SVM. The name of the QoS police group for each SVM needs to be different.
For new LUNs, the policy can be applied directly:

lun create -vserver <vserver_name> -path  /vol/<volume_name>/<lun_name>   -size <size> -ostype <e.g. linux>  -qos-policy-group <policy-name>

It is recommended to use 1000MB/s as maximum throughput for a given LUN. If an application requires more throughput, multiple LUNs with LUN striping shall be used to provide the needed bandwidth. This guide provides an example for SAP HANA based on Linux LVM in section Host Setup.

Note The limit applies also to reads. Therefore use enough LUNs to fulfil the required SLAs for SAP HANA database startup time and for backups.

Configure storage

The following overview summarizes the required storage configuration steps. Each step is covered in more detail in the subsequent sections. In this section, we assume that the storage hardware is set up and that the ONTAP software is already installed. Also, the connection of the storage FCP ports to the SAN fabric must already be in place.

  1. Check the correct disk shelf configuration, as described in NVMe-based disk shelves.

  2. Create initiator groups (igroups) with worldwide names (WWNs) of HANA servers as described in the section link:saphana-asa-fc-storage-controller-setup.html#initiator-groups Initiator groups.

  3. Create LUNs and map them to the servers described in the section LUN configuration for SAP HANA single-host systems and LUN configuration for SAP HANA multiple-hosts systems

NVMe-based disk shelves

Each NS224 NVMe disk shelf is connected with two 100GbE ports per controller, as shown in the following figure. The disks are automatically distributed to both controllers of the HA pair.

NS224 NVMe disk shelf connection

Initiator groups

An igroup can be configured for each server or for a group of servers that require access to a LUN. The igroup configuration requires the worldwide port names (WWPNs) of the servers.

Using the sanlun tool, run the following command to obtain the WWPNs of each SAP HANA host:

sapcc-hana-tst:~ # sanlun fcp show adapter
/sbin/udevadm
/sbin/udevadm

host0 ...... WWPN:2100000e1e163700
host1 ...... WWPN:2100000e1e163701
Note The sanlun tool is part of the NetApp Host Utilities and must be installed on each SAP HANA host. More details can be found in section Host setup.