Planning your Cloud Volumes ONTAP configuration in Google Cloud
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When you deploy Cloud Volumes ONTAP in Google Cloud, you can choose a preconfigured system that matches your workload requirements, or you can create your own configuration. If you choose your own configuration, you should understand the options available to you.
Choosing a license type
Cloud Volumes ONTAP is available in two pricing options: pay-as-you-go and Bring Your Own License (BYOL). For pay-as-you-go, you can choose from three licenses: Explore, Standard, or Premium. Each license provides different capacity and compute options.
Understanding storage limits
The raw capacity limit for a Cloud Volumes ONTAP system is tied to the license. Additional limits impact the size of aggregates and volumes. You should be aware of these limits as you plan your configuration.
Sizing your system in GCP
Sizing your Cloud Volumes ONTAP system can help you meet requirements for performance and capacity. You should be aware of a few key points when choosing a machine type, disk type, and disk size:
- Machine type
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Look at the supported machine types in the Cloud Volumes ONTAP Release Notes and then review details from Google about each supported machine type. Match your workload requirements to the number of vCPUs and memory for the machine type. Note that each CPU core increases networking performance.
Refer to the following for more details:
- GCP disk type
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When you create volumes for Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you need to choose the underlying cloud storage that Cloud Volumes ONTAP uses for a disk. The disk type can be either Zonal SSD persistent disks or Zonal standard persistent disks.
SSD persistent disks are best for workloads that require high rates of random IOPS, while Standard persistent disks are economical and can handle sequential read/write operations. For more details, see Google Cloud documentation: Zonal Persistent disks (Standard and SSD).
- GCP disk size
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You need to choose an initial disk size when you deploy a Cloud Volumes ONTAP system. After that you can let Cloud Manager manage a system's capacity for you, but if you want to build aggregates yourself, be aware of the following:
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All disks in an aggregate must be the same size.
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Determine the space that you need, while taking performance into consideration.
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The performance of persistent disks scales automatically with disk size and the number of vCPUs available to the system.
Refer to the following for more details:
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GCP network information worksheet
When you deploy Cloud Volumes ONTAP in GCP, you need to specify details about your virtual network. You can use a worksheet to collect the information from your administrator.
| GCP information | Your value |
|---|---|
Region |
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Zone |
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VPC network |
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Subnet |
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Firewall policy (if using your own) |
Choosing a write speed
Cloud Manager enables you to choose a write speed setting for single node Cloud Volumes ONTAP systems. Before you choose a write speed, you should understand the differences between the normal and high settings and risks and recommendations when using high write speed.
Difference between normal write speed and high write speed
When you choose normal write speed, data is written directly to disk, thereby reducing the likelihood of data loss in the event of an unplanned system outage.
When you choose high write speed, data is buffered in memory before it is written to disk, which provides faster write performance. Due to this caching, there is the potential for data loss if an unplanned system outage occurs.
The amount of data that can be lost in the event of an unplanned system outage is the span of the last two consistency points. A consistency point is the act of writing buffered data to disk. A consistency point occurs when the write log is full or after 10 seconds (whichever comes first). However, AWS EBS volume performance can affect consistency point processing time.
When to use high write speed
High write speed is a good choice if fast write performance is required for your workload and you can withstand the risk of data loss in the event of an unplanned system outage.
Recommendations when using high write speed
If you enable high write speed, you should ensure write protection at the application layer.
Choosing a volume usage profile
ONTAP includes several storage efficiency features that can reduce the total amount of storage that you need. When you create a volume in Cloud Manager, you can choose a profile that enables these features or a profile that disables them. You should learn more about these features to help you decide which profile to use.
NetApp storage efficiency features provide the following benefits:
- Thin provisioning
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Presents more logical storage to hosts or users than you actually have in your physical storage pool. Instead of preallocating storage space, storage space is allocated dynamically to each volume as data is written.
- Deduplication
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Improves efficiency by locating identical blocks of data and replacing them with references to a single shared block. This technique reduces storage capacity requirements by eliminating redundant blocks of data that reside in the same volume.
- Compression
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Reduces the physical capacity required to store data by compressing data within a volume on primary, secondary, and archive storage.