OneFS SmartQuotas tracks disk usage with reports and allows for the enforcement of storage limits with alerts and hard boundaries. SmartQuotas consists of two types of capacity quota:
- Accounting Quotas: Monitor and report on the amount of storage consumed, but do not take any action.
- Enforcement Quotas: Restrict how much storage that a user, group, or directory can use and send notifications.
OneFS SmartQuotas can have one of four enforcement types:
- Hard: A limit that cannot be exceeded.
- Soft: A limit that can be exceeded until a grace period has expired.
- Advisory: An informal limit that can be exceeded.
- None: No enforcement. Quota is accounting only.
All three quota types have both a limit, or threshold, and a grace period. A hard quota has a zero-time grace period, an advisory quota has an infinite grace period, and a soft quota has a configurable grace period.
Even when a hard quota limit is reached, there are certain instances where operations are not blocked. These include administrative control by root (UID 0), system maintenance activities, and the ability of a blocked user to free up space.
Figure 14. SmartQuotas usage overview
SmartQuotas best practices include:
- Avoid creating quotas on the root directory of the default OneFS share (/ifs). A root-level quota may result in performance degradation.
- Where possible, observe the best practice of a maximum number of 500,000 quotas per cluster in OneFS 8.2 and later, and 20,000 quotas per cluster in prior releases.
- Limit quota depth to a maximum of 275 directories.
- Governing a single directory with overlapping quotas can also degrade performance.
- Directory quotas can also be used to alert of and constrain runaway jobs, preventing them from consuming massive amounts of storage space.
- Enforcement quotas are not recommended for snapshot-tracking quota domains.
- Before using quota data for analysis or other purposes, verify that no QuotaScan jobs are running.
- Rather than editing the quota email notification templates directly, copy them to another directory to edit and deploy them.
- If quota reports are not in the default directory, you can run the ‘isi quota settings reports view’ command to find the directory where they are stored.
- Use the ‘isi quota quotas notifications disable’ command to disable all notifications for a quota.