Prepare to manage your AFX storage system data
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Before managing your AFX data, you should be familiar with the basic concepts and capabilities.
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Because many of the concepts and administration procedures available on AFF and FAS systems are the same with AFX storage systems, reviewing the Unified ONTAP documentation can be helpful. |
Terminology and options
There are several terms related to AFX storage you should be familiar with.
- FlexVolume
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A FlexVol is a type of logical container used in AFX storage systems. FlexVol volumes can be expanded, contracted, moved, and efficiently copied. They can also be partitioned into more manageable units using qtrees and resource usage can be limited using quotas.
- FlexGroup
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A FlexGroup volume is a scale-out NAS container that provides both high performance and automatic load distribution. Each consists of multiple volumes that share traffic transparently. FlexGroup volumes offer several benefits, including improved scalability and performance as well as simplified management.
- FlexCache
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FlexCache is an ONTAP caching technology that creates sparse, writable replicas of volumes on the same or different ONTAP clusters. It is designed to improve data access performance by bringing data closer to users, which can result in faster throughput with a smaller footprint. FlexCache is particularly useful for read-intensive workflows and helps to offload traffic from heavily accessed volumes.
- S3 bucket
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An S3 bucket is a storage container that holds objects or data in the cloud. With ONTAP, an S3 NAS bucket is a mapping between an S3 bucket name and a NAS path, allowing S3 access to any part of an SVM namespace with existing volumes and directory structure.
- Data container
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In the context of an AFX system, a data container is a generic term and can be either a volume or S3 bucket.
- Qtree
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A qtree is a logical subdivision within a volume that you can create to manage and organize data. It allows you to specify its properties and security style (NTFS or UNIX) and can inherit export policies from its parent volume or have its own. Qtrees can contain files and directories, and are often used to manage permissions and quotas more granularly within a volume.
- Quota
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A quota in ONTAP is a limit set on the amount of storage space or number of files that can be used by a user, group, or qtree. Quotas are used to manage and control resource usage within a storage system, ensuring that no single user or application can consume an excessive amount of resources.
Data migration options
There are several data migration options. The focus is on migrating external data into an AFX cluster.
Migrating data from Unified ONTAP
A fully integrated migration path from Unified ONTAP to AFX is available using the following technologies:
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SnapMirror
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SVM Migrate
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SVM DR
In addition, FlexCache volumes can be attached between AFX and Unified ONTAP in either direction.
Migrating data from a non-ONTAP source
Data migration from non-ONTAP systems can be performed using file-level copy operations. Fast copy utilities such as XCP or CloudSync can be used as well as standard utilities such as RoboCopy (for SMB) and rsync (for NFS) as well as third-party tools such as DataDobi.
Migration limitations
Existing Unified ONTAP systems can replicate to AFX if the data volume does not contain LUNs or NVMe namespaces. When replicating to a Unified ONTAP system, the minimum supported version for the Unified ONTAP system is 9.16.1. This is the first Unified ONTAP release that supports Advanced Capacity Balancing.
AFX support for NFS trunking
NFS trunking is a technology that enables NFS v4.1 clients to open multiple connections to different LIFs on the NFS server. This increases the data transfer speed and provides resilience through multiple paths. Trunking is beneficial for exporting FlexVol volumes to trunking-capable clients.
To enable trunking, you need to have an SVM configured for NFS and NFSv4.1 should be enabled. It also requires remounting all the NFSv4.x clients after a configuration change which can be disruptive.
File system analytics
File System Analytics (FSA) is a feature in ONTAP that provides real-time visibility into file usage and storage capacity trends within FlexGroup or FlexVol volumes.
FSA eliminates the need for external tools by offering insights into storage utilization and optimization opportunities. FSA provides detailed views at various levels of a volume's file system hierarchy, including the SVM, volume, directory, and file levels.
Display an overview of your storage
To get started managing your AFX data, you should display an overview of the storage.
You can access all the volumes and buckets defined for the AFX cluster. Each of these is considered to be a data container.
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In System Manager, select Storage and then Overview
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Next to Volumes, select
to display a list of volumes. -
Next to Buckets, select
to display a list of buckets. -
Update or create a data container as needed.