Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Storage (general) > Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas > Quota domains
SmartQuotas is based on the concept of domains—the linchpins of quota accounting. Since OneFS is a single file system, it relies on domains for defining the scope of a quota in place of the typical volume boundaries found in most storage systems. As such, a domain defines which files belong to a quota, accounts for each resource type in that set, and defines the top-level directory configuration point.
The following table lists the primary SmartQuotas resource types:
Resource type | Description |
Directory | A specific directory and all its subdirectories |
User | A specific user |
Group | All members of a specific group |
A domain defined as <name>@<folder> is the set of files under “folder,” owned by “name,” which could be either a user or a group. The files accounted include all files reachable from the given path, without traversing any soft links. The owner name can be ALL; /ifs, the OneFS root directory, is also an effective ALL for “folder.”
With SmartQuotas, you can quickly and easily create traditional domain types by using ALL. Here are a few examples of domain types:
Domains cannot be created on anything but directories. More specifically, domains are associated with the actual directories themselves, not directory paths. For example, if the domain is ALL@/ifs/home/data, but /ifs/home/data gets renamed to /ifs/home/files, the domain stays with the directory.
Domains can also be nested and may overlap. For example, a hard quota is set on /ifs/data/marketing for 5 TB, and 1 TB soft quotas are then placed on individual users in the marketing department. These quotas ensure that the marketing directory as a whole never exceeds 5 TB, while the marketing department users are limited to 1 TB each.