What is the DPO license and how does it affect QoS policies and latency?

Applies to    

• ONTAP 9.3 or higher
• Data Protection Optimized (DPO) License

Answer

• Data Protection Optimized (DPO) functionality increases the amount of concurrent SnapMirror sessions per node, as well as improving SnapMirror performance to the cluster
  • DPO is not intended for use on systems containing production data
• After upgrading to ONTAP 9.3+ OR creating a new vserver in ONTAP 9.3+ with DPO licensing, new QoS policies with the naming convention <vserver>_dpo_default are generated and applied to the correspondingly named vservers
  • In the example output below, vserver vs4 has a DPO default QoS policy that was automatically generated:

cluster11::> qos policy-group show
Name             Vserver     Class        Wklds Throughput
---------------- ----------- ------------ ----- ------------
vs4_dpo_default  vs4         user-defined 1     100000 IOPS
pg2              vs2         user-defined 2     0-500IOPS
pg5              vs1         user-defined 4     0-300IOPS
pg6              vs0         user-defined 1     0-INF
4 entries were displayed.

• ONTAP 9.3+ Data Protection Optimized (DPO-licensed or also called DP_Optimized) SnapMirror destination clusters auto-create a <vserver>_dpo_default QoS policy with an auto-configured IOPs limit
  • The intent of these auto-generated QoS policies is to limit the impact of client workload on SnapMirror relationships
• The QoS policies are applied when a new vserver in a DPO-licensed cluster is created in ONTAP 9.3, or to any vserver without a pre-existing QoS policy applied in a cluster that is subsequently upgraded to ONTAP 9.3
• The Data Protection Optimized (DPO) license is cluster-wide. When the DPO license is activated and enabled on an ONTAP cluster, it applies to all nodes within that cluster.

Additional Information

• Why is there QoS latency after upgrading to ONTAP 9.3+?
• Data Protection Optimization documentation
• You can validate that you have a DPO license applied by executing the license show command at the cluster shell (example output below):

Cluster::> license show

  (system license show)

Serial Number: 1-80-000011

Owner: Cluster

Package          Type    Description          Expiration

----------------- -------- ----------------------------------------

Base             site     Cluster Base License  -

NFS              site     NFSLicense           -

CIFS             site     CIFS License         -

iSCSI            site     iSCSILicense         -

SnapMirror       site     SnapMirror License    -

FlexClone        site     FlexClone License     -

VE               site     Volume Encryption License -

DP_Optimized  site    Data ProtectionOptimized Secondary License -