ONTAP 9.12.1P2 - Exceeding the 16 TiB LUN Limit and 100 TiB Volume Limit.


Userlevel 6
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In Feb 2023 NetApp announced the release of ONTAP 9.12.1 to introduce some new hardware the C-Series models. One big item that customers were eager for was large volume and LUN support. This was experimental and was not enabled without support assistance.

It is now enabled by default in ONTAP 9.12.1P2 and later releases. Please see images below to compare the old and new Volume and LUN sizes.

This will open up new opportunities for existing customers running out of space on their ONTAP Veeam backup repos. They can increase them to use larger LUNs 128 Tib or Volumes 300 Tib

 

Image 1 - Max LUN size on ONTAP 9.12.1P2 LUN 128 TiB versus ONTAP 9.12.1P1 LUN 16 TiB

Image 2 - Max Volume size ONTAP 9.12.1P2 300 TiB versus ONTAP 9.12.1P1 100 TiB

Image 3 - 16 TiB LUN Max in ONTAP System Manager 9.12.1P1

Image 4 - 128 TiB LUN Max in ONTAP System Manager 9.12.1P2

You will need a NetApp account to download latest update - https://mysupport.netapp.com/

 


10 comments

Userlevel 7
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Nice feature add for NetApp customers for sure. I'm a Nimble person myself 😊

Userlevel 6
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Yes @coolsport00  Veeam loves storage integration with many alliance partners 😉

Userlevel 7
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Wow amazing how small the LUN sizes were before the update. Nice to see them much bigger now. Don't use NetApp where I am but rather Hitachi and Lenovo. Still also have a Nimble in the lab too which I miss.

Userlevel 6
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@Chris.Childerhose yes HUGE jump for Veeam customers that use NetApp😁

Userlevel 7
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Nice feature add for NetApp customers for sure. I'm a Nimble person myself 😊

I do like the HF20 I deployed a couple months ago, but I’m a Dell guy personally.  Nimble to me just feels so much like an Equallogic.

Userlevel 7
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Nice feature add for NetApp customers for sure. I'm a Nimble person myself 😊

I do like the HF20 I deployed a couple months ago, but I’m a Dell guy personally.  Nimble to me just feels so much like an Equallogic.

Nimble is definitely far from Equallogic I must say that.  LOL

May be some similarities but Nimble is very good and I would choose that over some other vendors out there for sure.  😁

Userlevel 7
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That was quite small before. I think 256TB is what my FS7200s will max out at.      I try to keep my lun size signicantly smaller than that however.    With dual multicore processors in these SANS now, having more LUNS spreads the load out evenly across cores.  In fact, if you don’t have enough LUNS you are not even going to hit some of the cores.

 

Check your vendors best practices for your specific storage, but that is usually the case.  

 

There are other things like queue depth I won’t bother getting in to, or the simple fact that cloning, or copying a 256TB LUN is really annoying. Snapshots become a different monster too when you could snapshot a single small LUN or a giant LUN with ALL of the data. 

 

 

Userlevel 7
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That was my thought, too. The IBM boxes have much higher LUN maximums for a long time.

Never had problems on these systems with large LUNs… If there was a problem it was on the server side 😎

Userlevel 7
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Nice feature add for NetApp customers for sure. I'm a Nimble person myself 😊

I do like the HF20 I deployed a couple months ago, but I’m a Dell guy personally.  Nimble to me just feels so much like an Equallogic.

Nimble is definitely far from Equallogic I must say that.  LOL

May be some similarities but Nimble is very good and I would choose that over some other vendors out there for sure.  😁

Oh...I’m not arguing that.  I’m just saying that some of the underlying architecture feels the same.  Active/Standby controllers, the concept of creating a group and adding multiple arrays to that group, etc.  There’s clearly some other items there such as the way Nimble does it’s caching and such that is beyond what Equallogic is, but I’m also comparing a current generation Nimble to a Product line that Dell sunsetted 6ish years ago.

Userlevel 2
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Nice, very nice!

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