Hi all,
does anyone of you has experience with snapmirror an larger amount of data.
At the moment we do a snapmirror of about 100tb data distributed over about 10 volumes to a sata aggreagate on a second filer with 85 4tb sata disks (5x17disk raidgroup). Source is FAS 8040, target is FAS 8020 both with cdot 8.3p1. We already moved all workload from the target aggregate, so it hosts only snapmirror targets.
On the source side we do 1 snapshot per day and keep 14 snapshots. Snapmirror is done once per day. From counting snapshots I would say daily change rate is 2-2,5tb for all volumes.
Snapmirror is working fine and finished in less than 2-3h, but container block reclamation and deswizzling is totally killing the aggregate on the target side. We do see continous load of 30MB read and disk util for all disks except parity disks is 90-100%.
At first we planned 4h snapshot but that is just not possible. At the moment we disabled deswizzle and get to a point where if we are lucky the target aggregate load drops in the night just before next snapmirror kicks in.
We are quite new to Netapp but it sounds ridiciolous, that you need so much io for just a plain replication and some snaps.
Do you have any experience with snapshots and snapmirror using sata disks? I think snapshots and snapmirror on Netapp are very resource demanding. It is true that the creation of snapshots on Netapp is super efficient and instant but as soon as snapshot has to be deleted container block reclamation kicks in and takes large amount of disk resource. Same for snapmirror, it is really cool and stable, but deswizzling for logical to physical block mapping with large data affects snapmirror target performance heavily.
Best wishes,
Stefan