This page provides an overview of the volumes feature of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes.
About volumes
A volume is a file system container in a storage pool that stores application, database, and user data.
You create a volume's capacity using the available capacity in the storage pool and you can define and resize the capacity without disruption to your processes.
Storage pool settings apply to the volumes contained within them automatically. These settings include the service level, location, network (Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)), Active Directory policy, LDAP, and the customer-managed encryption key (CMEK) policy.
Volume performance
Flex storage pools: the performance of a volume depends on the size and capabilities of its storage pool. The pool performance is shared between all volumes in the pool.
Standard storage pools: the volume's performance is defined by the volume size and the service level it inherits from the pool. The volume size can be increased or decreased to optimize performance.
Premium and Extreme storage pools: the volume's performance is defined by the volume size and the service level it inherits from the pool. The volume size can be increased or decreased to optimize performance. Additionally, you can move a volume non-disruptively between Premium and Extreme pools to optimize performance.
Space provisioning
You should provision the right amount of capacity to your volume large enough to hold your data and leave some empty space as buffer for growth.
If a volume becomes full, clients receive an out of space error when they try
to modify or add data, which can lead to problems for your applications or
users. You should monitor usage of your volumes and maintain a provisioned space
buffer of 20% above your expected volume utilization. For information on
monitoring usage, see Monitor NetApp Volumes.
Snapshots consume the volume's capacity. For more information, see Snapshot space use.
Volume user and group quotas
User and group quotas on NetApp Volumes can limit volume space used by specific users or groups. Note that these are different from Google Cloud Quotas and system limits. You set user and group quotas directly on a NetApp Volumes volume.
Quotas can be set for individual Windows or Unix users, or Unix groups, but not for Windows groups. Quotas target the specific user IDs (UID), security identifier (SID), or group IDs (GID) for the user or group, not the name.
Quotas are intended to limit usage, not to allocate storage for a user's usage. Quota limits are checked in sequential order, starting with user quotas and then group quotas. When quota limits are reached, writes are blocked. Group quotas are shared by all users in the group. For more information about how to manage quota rules, see Manage quota rules.
For example, three groups HR, Finance, and Management share a 10 TiB volume. The default group quota is 500 GiB which limits HR and Management group users, and Finance has a 10 TiB group quota. The default user quota is 1 TiB. Users Sasha in Finance and Alex in Management are assigned an individual user quota of 5 TiB. The following are some examples of the effective quota for specific users:
Users Kim in HR, Taylor, and Alex in Management are limited to a 500 GiB group quota. Alex's 5 TiB user quota is effectively overridden by the group quota.
User Sasha in Finance is limited by the user quota to 5 TiB.
User Lee in Finance is limited by the user quota to 1 TiB.
No one in Finance has a user quota greater than 5 TiB, thus none can individually store up to the 10 TiB group quota.
When users try to write beyond the quota limit, they will receive an error. User quota consumption and limits are visible to the user in Windows Explorer or Linux quota command. The group quota consumption and limits are only visible when using an rquota v2 compatible client.
There are four types of quota rules:
Individual user quota: applies to explicit user using Linux UID or Windows SID
Individual group quota: applies to explicit group using Linux GID without Windows support
Default user quota: applies to every user without an individual quota rule
Default group quota: applies to every group without an individual quota rule
Volume reversion
NetApp Volumes lets you revert volumes to a previously created snapshot. When you revert a volume, it restores all volume contents back to the point in time the snapshot was taken. Any snapshot created after the snapshot used for the reversion is lost. If you don't want to lose data, we recommend that you clone a volume or restore data with snapshots instead.
You can use volume reversion to test and upgrade applications or fend off ransomware attacks. The process is similar to overwriting the volume with a backup, but only takes a few seconds. You can revert a volume to a snapshot independent of the capacity of the volume.
Reversions happen when the volume is online and in use by clients. We recommend stopping all critical applications before you revert to avoid potential data corruption because the reversion changes open files without any notification to the application.
Block volume from deletion when clients are connected
NetApp Volumes lets you block the deletion of volumes when they are mounted by a client. If you use volumes for Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) datastores, you must enable the setting to block the deletion of volumes when clients have mounted volumes. If you enable Block volume from deletion when clients are connected setting, an error message displays when you try to delete a mounted volume.
Volumes support blocking the deletion of volumes when you create a volume, create a new volume from a snapshot, and create a new volume from a backup.
The following protocols support blocking the deletion of volumes:
NFSV3
NFSV4.1
NFSV3 and NFSV4.1
To delete a volume when this option is enabled, all the clients must first unmount the volume. After that, you must wait for more than 52 hours to delete the volume.
Large capacity volumes
Premium and Extreme service levels allow volume sizes between 100 GiB and 102,400 GiB and maximum throughput of up to 4.5 GiBps. Some workloads require larger volumes and higher throughput, which can be achieved by using the large capacity volume option with Premium and Extreme service levels.
Large capacity volumes can be sized between 15 TiB and 1 PiB in increments of 1 GiB and deliver throughput performance of up to 30 GiBps.
Large capacity volumes offer six storage endpoints (IP addresses) to load-balance client traffic to the volume and achieve higher performance. The six IP addresses make such volumes an ideal candidate for workloads which require high performance and highly concurrent access to the same data. For recommendations on how to connect your clients, see Connect large capacity volumes with multiple storage endpoints. Volumes cannot be converted into large capacity volumes and the other way around after creation.
Large capacity volumes limitations
The following limitations are applicable for large capacity volumes:
You should use a dedicated service project for large capacity volumes.
Volume backups are not supported.
The storage pool holding the volume is subject to a location-based quota. If you need more capacity, request a quota increase for the Storage pool capacity (GiB) per location quota. For more information, see NetApp Volumes quotas.
Auto-tiering
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes lets you enable auto-tiering on a per-volume basis if auto-tiering is enabled on the storage pool. Auto-tiering reduces the overall cost of volume usage. For more information about auto-tiering, see Manage auto-tiering.