How many IOPs can a FAS or AFF controller handle
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Applies to
- ONTAP 9
- All FAS and AFF models
Answer
- The account team must do a sizing exercise and estimate this value through their sizing tools to determine this.
- Support cannot provide a report as the tools and training are from the account team.
- Active IQ Unified Manager can estimate peak IOPs using performance capacity to give an estimation.
- There are no internal tools in ONTAP to test performance limits without external IO access.
Do IOP types matter?
- Different operations within the same application may require a different IOP limit.
- It depends on the workload type, as databases will have different i/o requirements than home directories, for example.
- There is not one answer as IOP types are different based upon read, write, and other.
- Other IOPs have variable impact depending on type.
- For example, a directory deletion will take more CPU cycles and disk cycles than an Access operation.
- Example:
- Copying large files to ONTAP may be 512kB writes and may only get 10,000 IOPS.
- Reading lots of small files may be an average of 4 kB read IOPs and can get 70,000 IOPS.
- That same controller may do 500,000 NFSv3 Access operations.
Additional Information
Is it possible to get each aggregate's max theorical iops and bandwidth?