HI Shane,
How are you doing?
There is no grace period. Its fixed when you setup the quotas until you change it and resize the quota.
The hard limit sets a limit on operations, it can be configured setting up limit on either file or disk. In the other hand, the soft limit will alert the Administrator/users to take actions to increase the quotas if required.
The naming does make sense, atleast it does for us who has been using NetApp for past 8+ years. May be you need to get used to it 🙂
Have a good one.
Cheers,
Deepu Joseph