NetApp deduplication works by removing duplicate blocks at the storage volume level, storing only one physical copy, regardless of how many logical copies are present. Therefore, deduplication creates the illusion that there are numerous copies of that block. Deduplication automatically removes duplicate data blocks on a 4KB block level across an entire volume. This process reclaims storage to achieve space and potential performance savings by reducing the number of physical writes to the disk. Deduplication can provide more than 70% space savings in Hyper-V environments.

Thin provisioning is an efficient way to provision storage because the storage is not preallocated up front. In other words, when a volume or LUN is created using thin provisioning, the space on the storage system is unused. The space remains unused until the data is written to the LUN or volume and only the necessary space to store the data is used. NetApp recommends enabling thin provisioning on the volume and disabling LUN reservation.

Storage QoS in clustered ONTAP enables you to group storage objects and set throughput limits on the group. Storage QoS can be used to limit the throughput to workloads and to monitor workload performance. With this ability, a storage administrator can separate workloads by organization, application, business unit, or production or development environments.

In enterprise environments, storage QoS helps to achieve the following:

QoS allows you to limit the amount of I/O sent to an SVM, a flexible volume, a LUN, or a file. I/O can be limited by the number of operations or the raw throughput.

The following figure illustrates SVM with its own QoS policy enforcing a maximum throughput limit.

To configure an SVM with its own QoS policy and monitor policy group, run the following commands on your ONTAP cluster: