ONTAP 9 Storage Pool and Flash Pool

ONTAP 9 Storage Pool and Flash Pool Configuration:

How Flash Pools work

The Flash Pool technology enables you to add one or more RAID groups composed of SSDs to an aggregate that consists of RAID groups of HDDs.

The SSDs provide a high-performance cache for the active data set of the data volumes provisioned on the Flash Pool, which offloads I/O operations from the HDDs to the SSDs. For random workloads, this can increase the performance of the volumes associated with the aggregate by improving the response time and overall throughput for I/O-bound data access operations.

The SSD cache does not contribute to the size of the aggregate as calculated against the maximum aggregate size. For example, even if an aggregate is at the maximum aggregate size, you can add an SSD RAID group to it. The SSDs do count toward the overall spindle limit.

The HDD RAID groups in a Flash Pool behave the same as HDD RAID groups in a standard aggregate, following the same rules for mixing disk types, sizes, speeds, and checksums.

1. First list and check the SSD disks are available in the disk shelf.

2. Create a storage pool.

3. Specify the storage pool name  and Number of disks.

4. The same as if you want to create in CLI, use the following command to create a storage pool.

5. Then create an Aggregate with FCAL disks and select the Flash Options to create a Flash pool.

6. Select the number of disks to add to an aggregate.

7. You can see the aggregate change to flash pool.

8. You can see the SSD disks also the part of Aggregate.

9. Same you can create through CLI also.

First create an aggregate using FCAL disks.

10. Check the aggregate option Hybrid_Enabled .

11. Modify the aggregate option.

12. Now you can see the option set as true.

13. Now to create a Flash pool, add a SSD disks to an existing aggregate.

14. Now you can see the two raid groups, one is using FACL and oher one is SSD.