ONTAP 9 Infinite Volume Configuration Tutorial

Infinite Volume:

Infinite Volume addresses the enterprise content repository market and is optimized for scale and ease of management. Infinite Volume is a cost-effective large container that can grow to PBs of storage and billions of files. It is built on NetApp’s reliable fabric-attached storage (FAS) and V-Series systems, and it inherits the advanced capabilities of clustered Data ONTAP.

By providing a single large container for unstructured data, e-mail, video, and graphics, Infinite Volume eliminates the need to build data management capabilities into applications with big content requirements. For these environments, Infinite Volume takes advantage of native storage efficiency features, such as deduplication and compression, to keep storage costs low. Further, since Infinite Volume is built into clustered Data ONTAP, the customer is able to host both Infinite Volume(s) and FlexVol® volumes together in a unified scale-out storage solution. This provides the customer with the ability to host a variety of different applications in a multi-tenancy environment, with nondisruptive operations and the ability to use both SAN and NAS in the same storage infrastructure leveraging the same hardware.

Advantages of Infinite Volume :

Infinite Volume offers many business advantages for enterprise content repositories. For example, an Infinite Volume for an enterprise content repository solution can be used to: 

• Reduce the cost of scalability 
• Lower the effective cost per GB 
• Efficiently ingest, store, and deliver large amounts of data 
• Reduce complexity and management overhead 
• Simplify and automate storage management operations 
• Provide seamless operation and data and service availability 

Infinite Volume leverages dense storage shelves from NetApp with the effective use of large-capacity storage disks. The solution is built on top of the proven foundation of Data ONTAP with storage efficiency features like deduplication and compression. 

Overview of Infinite Volume:

NetApp Infinite Volume is a software abstraction hosted over clustered Data ONTAP. It provides a single mountpoint that can scale to 20PB and 2 billion files, and it integrates with NetApp’s proven technologies and products, such as deduplication, compression, and NetApp SnapMirror® replication technology. 

Infinite Volume writes an individual file in its entirety to a single node but distributes the files across several controllers within a cluster.

1. Select SVM tab and create a new SVM and select infinite volume.

2. Set CIFS/NFS settings.

3. Select the aggregates.

4. SVM with infinite volume got successfully created.

5. New infinite volume creation.

6. Volume got created and mounted.

7. Create a cifs shares and access from windows server.

8. Now you can able to access the cifs share.

9. Now you can add another aggregate to an existing infinite volume and increase the size of the volumes.

10. In this pic, you can see only 2 aggregates.

11. Now you can add another aggregate.

12. Now it is 3 aggregates.

14. Volume successfully resized.

Unified Security Style: 

 Infinite Volumes always use unified security style. Unified security style allows all users to view and set file permissions regardless of whether they are CIFS or NFS clients. Further, it allows the file permissions to include both Windows® and UNIX® users and groups, allowing more simplified security management. 

Another part of unified security is support for unified ACLs, which consolidates file permissions for both UNIX and Windows users and groups in a single access control list. Unified ACLs facilitate access checks using both Windows and UNIX credentials. They provide multiprotocol access to files without relying on user mapping between UNIX and Windows users.