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What a FlexGroup volume is

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A FlexGroup volume is a scale-out NAS container that provides high performance along with automatic load distribution and scalability. A FlexGroup volume contains several constituents that automatically and transparently share the traffic. Constituents are the underlying FlexVol volumes that make up a FlexGroup volume.

FlexGroup volume represented as a group of FlexVol volumes called constituents

FlexGroup volumes provide the following benefits:

  • High scalability

    The maximum size for a FlexGroup volume in ONTAP 9.1 and later is 20 PB, with 400 billion files on a 10-node cluster.

  • High performance

    FlexGroup volumes can utilize the resources of the cluster to serve workloads that have high throughput and low latency.

  • Simplified management

    A FlexGroup volume is a single namespace container that can be managed in a similar way as FlexVol volumes.