Temperature-sensitive storage efficiency

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Hello,

I am reading up on recently added OnTAP features and ran across temperature-sensitive storage efficiency. If I'm reading it right, it appears to be a tool to manage the tradeoff between performance and greater space savings. On our AFF system, we never have performance issues and I want to get the maximum amount of storage efficiency possible. Again if I'm reading right, TSSE might slightly improve performance but you might get slightly less space savings. Can anyone comment on whether that is an accurate summary or have I misread the documentation?

For context: on our AFF system, I currently I leave all volumes on auto, except our VMware datastore volumes which do gain a few hundred extra GB of savings by scheduling an efficiency job each night.

[beo]

Hi, tsse uses adaptive compression (good Performance, normal savings) and when the block gets cold (for tsse its 14 days) its recrompressed with secondary compression(better savings, with slower read perf). 
But it depends on your ontap version and if your vol was newly created with at least ontap 9.8 (if i remember right).

Until now I never noticed a speed issue with it. 

regards, René 

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Thank you @beo ! Interesting. Nearly all of our vols were created pre-9.8 so I may hold off on this for awhile.

[beo · Accepted solution]

As far as I know, you need to migrate these "old volume data" to a new vol created with TSSE enabled (9.8 and newer). Just updating Ontap wouldn´t help if you want to use it.  See the "Mitigation" in den table with TSSE: 
https://kb.netapp.com/onprem/ontap/hardware/How_to_maximize_storage_efficiency_on_All_Flash_FAS_systems_running_ONTAP_9.x

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Thanks @beo , good to know. Since we have hundreds of volumes we'll likely just leave this feature turned off except on new volumes.