Extra storage, no extra charge.

It’s nice to get more for nothing, right?

With ONTAP, one of the brand new features in ONTAP 9.8 is advanced data compression for cold data.
What is this? Well, if data hasn’t been touched in a while, additional compression will now be applied to this data - so all of your old data will take up even less space. Up to 33% more space could be available if you have large pools of old data you’re keeping for regulatory compliance, legal compliance, or (especially if your users are like me) things that are just never deleted - and no one knows what’s actually stored.

How does it work? Well, currently compression on ONTAP uses an 8K block size to form compression groups. This data is compressed, but only within this 8KB, so squeezing it down is efficient, but you lose some savings as there might be data in the next block that could compress with this one.

The upside is that this is then easy to decompress, keeping speed up for applications. With cold compression, the system uses the object tracking which is used for FabricPool to determine which blocks haven’t been accessed recently. This is configurable up to 183 days now.

When the system finds cold blocks it will then apply a 32KB compression group to the blocks instead of 8KB, which combines original groups at a ratio of 4:1.

Because the groups are bigger, the savings across the groups are bigger.

And the cost? Well, it’s a Free of Charge, non-impacting, non-disruptive upgrade. Which is nice.

Want to know more about ONTAP 9.8 and what it can do for you? Get in touch.