SnapLock Disk Usage

[chriskranz]

Quick question. I have a customer who has a 270 with some disks that are in a SnapLock Aggregate. The 270 is fully populated and the SnapLock Aggregate is now full.

What is the best practice for continuing. Is it safe to remove the disks from the system and store them securely (and cleanly) somewhere? This way you free up slots for some new disks and a new Aggregate.

[barrow]

I don't recommend taking the disks off-line. At least they shouldn't do so without recognizing the ramifications of such a decision. When the disks are off-line, the Compliance Clock will not be progressing with the pace of real time. So, you will end up extending the actual retention of the data on the disks. So, if you were to take those disks off line for 9 months and then reconnect them to a storage system, the Compliance Clock on that system will jump backwards by 9 months. In the latest versions of Data ONTAP, the Compliance Clock will try to catch up with the current time at the rate of 7 days per year.

Check the Data ONTAP documentation for more details on the Compliance Clock.

[chriskranz]

The customer has a backup-forever policy, so if the compliance clock is out, it shouldn't make too much difference to them.

Are there any other implications or cautions? Or any recommendations for how to store the disks? Cheers for the reply!

[barrow]

Well -- if they're OK with the indefinite expiration of their retentions due to the disks being off-line, I guess that's OK. They must not be exposed to the world of litigation!

Anyways, I would just be sure to keep the disk in their shelves in an environmentally-safe area. Keeping them in the datacenter powered off would be the safest. You should also be prepared to power them up periodically so that some disk scrubs and the like can take place. Also, it would make sense to make sure that the disk and shelf firmware stays relatively up-to-date.

I personally don't have a lot of experience with keeping disks off-line like this. When I was a NetApp customer, we were constantly using our disks and could never bear to take a chunk of them offline!