E-Series 2824 - Increase Volume Slow...

[danielduartefarinha]

Hi guys,

Before anything: I Love ONTAP. 

I've been working with FAS, AFF for some time. Everything is good (almost, but as expected).

My pre-sales team sold an E-Series for the first time. It is being used for a VMware enviroment, 

The thing is: increasing a volumes takes years! Like, increasing a volume from 5Tb to 6Tb asks me for 3 days!! On ONTAP, after a click, we have it. 

How can I create a volume in seconds, in the same system, and increasing a volume takes years? In the NetApp documentation just say: "monitor the increase  by clicking in "see operations in progress in Santricity"".

Is this normal?

Thanks in advance.

[MitchBlackburn]

This is normal for E-Series when using a volume group. You can modify the priority of the operation in order to speed it up (use the online help to see how), but this means something else will be slowed down.

[danielduartefarinha]

Ok, I just would like to know why that is "Normal" and so well accepted?

Thanks, 

Daniel

[elementx]

Since noone has answered, I'll speculate: I guess because unlike ONTAP and SolidFire, this operation requies that a lot of data be actuall moved.

It's not just a logical representation that changes (in case of SolidFire, for example, a volume size is described in a much smaller volume metadata structure, and all it takes to increase a volume is to modify the volume's metadata to accept additional metadata-to-data mapping and that change barely requires any IO). E-Series is less virtualized, but the simpler approach results in relatively faster performance compared to arrays with (relatively) more complexity.

[danielduartefarinha]

I was thinking on that too.

I was speculating that WAFL is not working as it works on Ontap. With that said, the moved is really addresses as a whole. If I have a volume 1, volume 2,volume 3 and I want to increase the first one... I will need to move the second and the third.

Just my guess.

Anyway, that is enough for not buying E-series comparing with FAS, AFF. My opinion, of course.