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Volume snapshots

Contributors juliantap
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Learn more about how Astra Trident handles the creation of volume snapshots for its drivers.

  • For the ontap-nas, ontap-san, aws-cvs, gcp-cvs, and azure-netapp-files drivers, each Persistent Volume (PV) maps to a FlexVol. As a result, volume snapshots are created as NetApp snapshots. NetApp’s snapshot technology delivers more stability, scalability, recoverability, and performance than competing snapshot technologies. These snapshot copies are extremely efficient both in the time needed to create them and in storage space.

  • For the ontap-nas-flexgroup driver, each Persistent Volume (PV) maps to a FlexGroup. As a result, volume snapshots are created as NetApp FlexGroup snapshots. NetApp’s snapshot technology delivers more stability, scalability, recoverability, and performance than competing snapshot technologies. These snapshot copies are extremely efficient both in the time needed to create them and in storage space.

  • For the ontap-san-economy driver, PVs map to LUNs created on shared FlexVols. VolumeSnapshots of PVs are achieved by performing FlexClones of the associated LUN. ONTAP’s FlexClone technology makes it possible to create copies of even the largest datasets almost instantaneously. Copies share data blocks with their parents, consuming no storage except what is required for metadata.

  • For the solidfire-san driver, each PV maps to a LUN created on the NetApp Element software/NetApp HCI cluster. VolumeSnapshots are represented by Element snapshots of the underlying LUN. These snapshots are point-in-time copies and only take up a small amount of system resources and space.

  • When working with the ontap-nas and ontap-san drivers, ONTAP snapshots are point-in-time copies of the FlexVol and consume space on the FlexVol itself. This can result in the amount of writable space in the volume to reduce with time as snapshots are created/scheduled. One simple way of addressing this is to grow the volume by resizing through Kubernetes. Another option is to delete snapshots that are no longer required. When a VolumeSnapshot created through Kubernetes is deleted, Astra Trident will delete the associated ONTAP snapshot. ONTAP snapshots that were not created through Kubernetes can also be deleted.

With Astra Trident, you can use VolumeSnapshots to create new PVs from them. Creating PVs from these snapshots is performed by using the FlexClone technology for supported ONTAP and CVS backends. When creating a PV from a snapshot, the backing volume is a FlexClone of the snapshot’s parent volume. The solidfire-san driver uses Element software volume clones to create PVs from snapshots. Here it creates a clone from the Element snapshot.