NetApp cDOT – Volume Move

In next few entries I would like to describe some non-disruptive operations that are possible within Clustered Data ONTAP. In this article I will focus on a DataMotion for Volumes functionality. It is a build-in functionality that you get with your clustered ONTAP system. As I mentioned in my previous post about SVMs (What is SVM?) and in describing benefits of a cluster , data SVM is acting as a dedicated virtual storage controller, which is not “linked” to any single node, not even to single HA pair within the cluster. Volume move is an excellent example of this advantage. You can easily, non-disruptively (continue reading to understand it fully) move a volume between two different nodes, operation will be executed in the background and it will be practically invisible for Your users! There are some things you have to consider, of course. Especially if Your volumes contains LUNs, I will describe that a bit later.

Why do we need volume move anyways?

Volume move (DataMotion for Volumes) is a very useful tool used often in capacity and performance planning. It might happen (and almost always does) that your data aggregates utilization differs inside Your cluster. Having the possibility to non-disruptively move volumes across aggregates is great benefit in such cases. Also, often particular node in the cluster might have higher utilization (for example in terms of IOs) than others. You can choose the destination aggregate that belongs to different node (even in another HA pair within the same cluster!) to level-down the performance impact on each node.  Continue reading