That’s a 400x performance improvement with a free, easy to use tool. With XCP on a cDOT cluster? That listing took 30 minutes. I’ve seen bathroom renovations take less time than that. It’s a problem that is seen across vendors.Ĭase in point – that same not-to-be-named, non-NetApp storage vendor? It took 9 days to do a listing of the aforementioned 165 million files. It’s all those messy bits of file systems – the directory tree locations, filehandles, file permissions, owners – all the things that make file based storage awesome because of the granularity and security also make it not so awesome because of the overhead. And it has long been the bane of existence for NAS file systems. That “information” I mentioned? It’s called metadata.
Remember, you’re not just copying files – you are copying information associated with those files. Rsync would be similarly effective.Īnd data migration isn’t the only use case – XCP can also help with file listing. However, if you’re migrating a few large files, you won’t see a huge gain in speed. In another use case, a customer moved 4 BILLION inodes and a petabyte of data from a non-NetApp system to a cDOT system and it was 30x faster than rsync. We took an 8-10 day file copy down to twelve hours in our testing. I won’t name names, because that’s not what I do, but our test runs showed an unspecified NAS vendor’s migration of 165 million files took 20 times longer than XCP. Now, I can’t tell you something is really, really fast without giving you some empirical data. Its wheelhouse is high file count environments that use NFSv3, which also happens to be one of the more challenging scenarios for data migration. XCP is a freedata migration tool offered by NetApp that promises to accelerate NFSv3 migration for large unstructured NAS datasets, gather statistics about your files, sync, verify… pretty much anything you ever wanted out of a NAS migration tool. Thanks to some excellent work by one of NetApp’s architects, Peter Schay, we now have a utility that can help your migrations hit ludicrous speed – without needing rsync.Īlso be on the lookout for some more ONTAP goodness in ONTAP 9 that helps improve performance and capacity with NAS data. However, it faces the same challenges mentioned – it’s slow, especially when dealing with large numbers of objects and wide/deep directory structures. Some people swear it’s the best backup tool ever. One of the favorite migration tools of NAS data is rsync. And the challenges only get more apparent as the number of files grows. However, each of the available methods to migrate are not without challenges. This can migrate all NAS data types, as it’s file-system agnostic. There is also the old standby of NDMP, which just about every storage vendor supports. The arrows in your quiver (so to speak) for migrating NAS data are your typical utilities, such as the tried and true Robocopy for CIFS/SMB data. What tools are available to migrate unstructured NAS data? Then the complexity of the unstructured NAS data is exacerbated by the fact that it will take a very, very long time to migrate in some cases. When coming from a non-NetApp storage system, it gets trickier because copying the data is the *only* option at that point. If you’re coming from 7-Mode, you can certainly migrate using the 7MTT, which will copy all those folders and ACLs, but you potentially miss out on the opportunity to restructure that NAS data into a more manageable, logical format via copy-based transition (CBT). It’s a sore point for NAS migrations because it’s difficult to move due to the dependencies. It refers to a dataset that has been growing and growing over time and becoming harder and harder to manage at a granular level due to the directory structure, number of objects and the sheer amount of ACLs. If you’re not familiar with the term, unstructured NAS data is, more or less, just NAS data. (Also, stay tuned for more transition goodness coming very, very soon!) What’s unstructured NAS data? FIle-based copy for migration out of block-based (LUN) to file-based NAS.File-based copy (copy-based transition) for unstructured NAS data on non-NetApp storage.
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