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DPO systems feature enhancements

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Beginning with ONTAP 9.6, the maximum number of FlexVol volumes supported increases when the DP_Optimized (DPO) license is installed. Beginning with ONTAP 9.4, systems with the DPO license support SnapMirror backoff, cross-volume background deduplication, use of Snapshot blocks as donors, and compaction.

Beginning with ONTAP 9.6, the maximum supported number of FlexVol volumes on secondary or data protection systems has increased, enabling you to scale up to 2,500 FlexVol volumes per node, or up to 5,000 in failover mode. The increase in FlexVol volumes is enabled with the DP_Optimized (DPO) license. A SnapMirror license is still required on both the source and destination nodes.

Beginning with ONTAP 9.4, the following feature enhancements are made to DPO systems:

  • SnapMirror backoff: In DPO systems, replication traffic is given the same priority that client workloads are given.

    SnapMirror backoff is disabled by default on DPO systems.

  • Volume background deduplication and cross-volume background deduplication: Volume background deduplication and cross-volume background deduplication are enabled in DPO systems.

    You can run the storage aggregate efficiency cross-volume-dedupe start -aggregate aggregate_name -scan-old-data true command to deduplicate the existing data. The best practice is to run the command during off-peak hours to reduce the impact on performance.

  • Increased savings by using Snapshot blocks as donors: The data blocks that are not available in the active file system but are trapped in Snapshot copies are used as donors for volume deduplication.

    The new data can be deduplicated with the data that was trapped in Snapshot copies, effectively sharing the Snapshot blocks as well. The increased donor space provides more savings, especially when the volume has a large number of Snapshot copies.

  • Compaction: Data compaction is enabled by default on DPO volumes.