inodes and Volume Size Confirmation

[jschwegwsc]

Hi folks, I just wanted to get some confirmation on my future planning concerning inodes. I have a FAS2554 with a cifs volume that is currently 20TB. The type of data that I'm storing unfortunatley falls into the category of lots and lots of small files so I'm very sensitive to the concept of running out of inodes before running out of disk space. Please let me know if my thinking here is accurate.

The system "safe" default is to have one inode per 32KB of disk space. So that being said:

20TB =21474836480KB
21474836480 / 32=671088640

So with that math I can have as much as 671 million files on this volume and basically be fine? The directory structures are very well distributed and I won't run into a directory with an excessive amount of files, but rather there is just a lot of them.

It would also appear that no matter the volume size, the max inodes is always around 31m and then you just use maxfiles to increase from there. I've been simply increasing 20% at a time as needed, but looking to verify that 670 million figure.

Thanks.

[ekashpureff]

There's a max default inode count of 33,554,409.

See this bug report:

http://mysupport.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=662271

Yes, you can use maxfiles in 7-mode to increase the count.

In CDOT it's the -files parameter ov 'volume modify'.

See this KB:

https://kb.netapp.com/support/s/article/ka31A0000000y5pQAA/how-to-increase-maxfiles-on-a-volume-in-clustered-data-ontap

I hope this response has been helpful to you.

At your service,

Eugene E. Kashpureff, Sr.
Independent NetApp Consultant http://www.linkedin.com/in/eugenekashpureff
Senior NetApp Instructor, FastLane US http://www.fastlaneus.com/
(P.S. I appreciate 'kudos' on any helpful posts.)

[jschwegwsc]

Yes sir, it's cdot and I don't have any issues adjusting the maxfiles, but I was more just looking to verify that my 670 million inodes was an accurate number and would be perfectly fine on this volume if it ever got to that point (even though it won't).

It just seemed really high to me as I know others have had to dip down into inodes every 4k and I couldn't see why with that many files at 32k