Recommended best practices for Small File Storage Efficiency include:
- Only enable storage efficiency on an archive workflow with a high percentage of small files.
- Most logical space used on cluster is for small files. In this case, small files are considered as less than 512 KB in size.
- The default minimum age for packing is anything over one day, and this will override anything configured in the filepool policy.
- Where possible, limit changes (overwrites and deletes) to containerized files, which cause fragmentation and impact both file read performance and storage efficiency
- Ensure there is sufficient free space available on the cluster before unpacking any containerized data.
- Ensure the archive solution being used does not natively perform file containerization, or the benefits of OneFS small file storage efficiency will likely be negated.
- Use a path based filepool policy for configuration, where possible, rather than more complex filepool filtering logic.
- Do not configure the maximum file size value inside the file pool filter itself. Instead set this parameter using the isi_packing command.
- Use SFSE to archive static small file workloads, or those with only moderate overwrites and deletes.
- If necessary, run the defragmentation job on a defined schedule (such as weekly) to eliminate fragmentation.