The following guidelines are recommended to ensure that overall performance objectives for home-directory users are satisfied:
- Care should be taken when planning the file-pool policy configuration, in terms of what policies will be applied and in what sequence. Policies can conflict or override one another if not properly planned, analyzed for overall effect, and implemented on the PowerScale storage cluster.
- Enabling SmartCache for home-directory data can improve performance but can lead to data loss if a node loses power or crashes while uncommitted data is in the write cache.
- Home directories with large amounts of stale data—more than 60 days since last access, for example—can be migrated automatically via file-pool policy to archive storage on an archive pool, if available.