Compression on non flash systetm

[ShivaR]

How does it really help Compression on non flash systetm (we are using all SAS 1.8 TB disks). The reason Iam asking is, if we are using it would there be any impact to procuction on inline compression. 

And really how does it help for NFS mounted on VMware Datastores.

Ultimately wanted to know if it can help our environment 🙂

[paulstringfellow]

OK, so inline compression on non flash systems does have an overhead to be aware of, but depends very much on your system, if your controllers are already running with high utilisation then inline compression can have a serious impact...

you can inline compress on non flash systems, but just be wary of the overheads.

inline compression is on by default on AFF systems.

you can post compress, on non flash, so that will give you potential benefits without high performance impact, no massive penalty that i'm aware of with using compressed data when you are reading it back.

as for benefits, depends on the data of course, if it is possible to compress it, then you will see benefit, i've seen plenty of sites where there is significant advantage and capacity savings to be had with compression, way over those seen wth dedupe.

but as with all compression algorithms it depends on the data and how well that it can be compressed.

so is there benefit? possibly, it depends.

can you run it on non AFF - absolutely but be aware of potential performance overhead.

hope that helps.

[ShivaR]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your detail on this.

Can I know how is it good to use in VBLOCK environment using NFS mounts on it.

[paulstringfellow]

not sure about the interaction with VBLOCK... as that is an EMC platform, so not sure how you are intergrating ONTAP into that.

but in general, same rule really, yes you can compress an NFS data store.. but all of the same concerns remain.

can you controllers handle inline dedupe (so enough spare process capability) but most importantly is what are the data sets like.

like any stroage effciency technology, depends very much on the data sets.

worst case.. compress it.. if it doesn't give good results or the impact is to high, you can disable it again.

as always though, plan, investigate your environment, maybe check with your partner or NetApp account Rep if they can advise based on your specfic setup.