Small File Storage Efficiency for Archive is not free. There is always trade-off between cluster resource consumption (CPU, memory, disk), the potential for data fragmentation and the benefit of improved space utilization. Bear the following in mind:
- This is a storage efficiency product, not a performance product.
- The time to retrieve a packed archive image should not be much greater than an unpacked image data – unless fragmentation has occurred.
- Configuration is only by the OneFS CLI, rather than the WebUI, at this point.
- After enabling a filepool policy, the first SmartPools job may take a relatively long time due to packing work, but subsequent runs should be much faster.
- For clusters using CloudPools you cannot containerize stubbed files.
- SyncIQ data will be unpacked during replication, so packing will need to be configured on the target cluster.
- If the data is in a snapshot, it will not be packed – only HEAD file data will be containerized.
- The isi_packing --fsa command reports on the whole file system, so the overall utilization percentage can be misleading if other, non-containerized data is also present on the cluster.
- Alternate data streams (ADS, that is the streams themselves, not the parent files) will not be containerized by default.
- Packing and unpacking will be logically preserving actions, they will not cause logical changes to a file and therefore will not trigger snapshot COW.
- If you have already run SmartDedupe data deduplication software on your data, you will not see much additional benefit because your data is already in shadow stores.
- If you run SmartDedupe against packed data, the deduped files will be skipped.
- SFSE is compatible with SmartLock WORM and files protected with SmartLock file retention policies will be packed as expected.
- You can clone files with packed data.
- Containerization is managed by the SmartPools job. However, the SmartPoolsTree jobs, isi filepool apply, and isi set will also be able to perform file packing.
- Small file packing (SFSE) will not be applied to inlined data files (where a small file’s data is stored in its inode).
- Small file packing is not supported for data contained within writable snapshots.