Is ONTAP thin friendly ?

[Markinnz]

Hi,

We have a few FAS8200s that are using HPE 3PAR for storage, by default the volumes on the 3PAR are thin provisioned to the FAS8200s.

Is ONTAP friendly towards thin volumes provisioned to it from 3rd party arrays ?  So if data is deleted on a filer volume will it perform the equivalent of an unmap command to let the array know that blocks can be reclaimed ?

Or is there a way to write zeros to the freespace on a volume/aggregate so that the storage array can claim back space and make the volume thinner ?

Thanks!

[ttran]

Hello Markinnz,

Yes, ONTAP does support thin provisioning on the backend and does perform SCSI unmap with supported 3rd party backend. Please verify the compatibility on NetApp Interoperability Matrix. 

Regards,

Team NetApp

[Markinnz]

Excellent!

Are there any commands that show what back end array capabilities are available to the FAS8200 ?  To see if the FAS knows it can use unmap and is using it ?

Thanks!