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NAS FileSystem Size

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RobNWI

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May 14, 2007
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I'm working with a customer who wants to setup some 1TB+ filesystems. They currently have an NS502 and were previously told that very large filesystems would cause issues, such as extremly long boot times after a downtime, or crash. Does anyone know the recommended max filesystem size that won't cause issues upon boot?
 
Hi,

Just thought I'd bump this as I have a similar question.
I have actually been told by EMC that they don't recommend going above 600GB, however, the reasons behind this were less clear, some mumblings about cache optimization, not a clear explanation, and certainly nothing about boot times.

600GB doesn't seem much in this day and age, has anybody got any experience of larger than a 600GB FS on an NS500G or even the new sparkly NS40's?

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Somethings come from nothing, nothing seems to come from somethings - SFA - Guerilla

roycrom :)
 

I have 3 file systems over 1TB, with one over 2.5TB on an NSX Celerra - no issues!
 
Wow!! Over 2.5TB.

Do you know how many concurrent users you have accessing that file system?

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Somethings come from nothing, nothing seems to come from somethings - SFA - Guerilla

roycrom :)
 
Wouldn't be too sure about Concurrent users, but I'm sure the number of connections at any one time runs into 1000s. It's spread out across 3 DMs - main reason for the huge file systems is the damned PST files!!
 
Yes, they sure are a pain - we are soon to be migrating our NS500g to new NS40g and implementing a Centera File Archiver to move old static data to the secondary storage.

We can have up to - and constantly increasing - 6000 users at one time.

We are hopefully, in the not too distant future, going to add email extender functionality to the Centera and hopefully get rid of all our PST files. (Not cheap!)

All I want EMC to do is tell us what sort of performance hit we would take by running 600Gb+ FS's but 'blood' 'stone' and 'out of a' spring to mind!

We are only going to be running on one DM.

Is your large filesystem spanning DAE's? Do you back up your NAS via NDMP? How are you finding the restore times on that large filesytem?

Sorry for all the questions. I very rarely get to speak to other people about their NAS's and its better to get other user's experiences in the real world than to rely on EMC giving me consistent answers.

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Somethings come from nothing, nothing seems to come from somethings - SFA - Guerilla

roycrom :)
 
Our backend disk is a DMX, with filesystems spread throughout. Backups are currently using NFS, which makes archiving impossible, so moving to NDMP soon and implementing archiving. Restores are generally single file at a time, so restore times aren't such an issue. Wouldn't like to think about how long a complete restore would take should it be required (>8TB) - we are replicating to a 2nd Celerra in a 2nd site, so unlikely that we'd need to in a disaster.
I think everyone is probably in the same boat with regard to the PST files. EmailXtender (or equivalent 3rd party) will be our priority when it comes to archiving - if PSTs are gone (or most of) we can reclaim about 35-40% of our home directory file systems.
 
We are in the middle of a archiving project using EmailXtender, Caminosoft HSM and 2 4 Node centera's in the backend.

Please ask EMC² or your supplier for Centera performance...especially how long it will take to rebuild the system in case of a crash of one of the centera's.....in one word : it takes ages !

By the way backup and recovery is slow too... the box has a 1 Gbit copper interface only allowing a maximum throughput of 25-30 GByte/s according to our tests, guess how long it may take to backup or recover your 8 TB or how long it takes to rebuilt a mirror to a second machine.
If you mostly have small files (10-100 KB) the process may take several weeks...
 
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