To help ensure that you optimize your FabricPool configurations, you should familiarize yourself with a few considerations and requirements about using FabricPool.

General considerations and requirements

ONTAP 9.7

You must be running ONTAP 9.7 or later releases for the following FabricPool functionality:

Non transparent HTTP and HTTPS proxy to provide access to only whitelisted access points, and to provide auditing and reporting capabilities.
FabricPool mirroring to tier cold data to two object stores simultaneously
FabricPool mirrors on MetroCluster configurations

NDMP dump and restore enabled by default on FabricPool attached aggregates.

If the backup application uses a protocol other than NDMP, such as NFS or SMB, all data being backed up in the performance tier becomes hot and can affect tiering of that data to the cloud tier. Non-NDMP reads can cause data migration from the cloud tier back to the performance tier.

ONTAP 9.8

You must be running ONTAP 9.8 or later for the following FabricPool functionality:
- Cloud retrieval
- FabricPool with SnapLock Enterprise. FabricPool with SnapLock Enterprise requires a Feature Product Variance Request (FPVR). To create an FPVR, contact your sales team.
- Minimum cooling period maximum of 183 days
- Object tagging using user-created custom tags
- HDD FabricPool aggregates
  
  HDD FabricPools are supported with SAS, FSAS, BSAS and MSATA disks only on systems with 6 or more CPU cores.

ONTAP 9.10.1

You must be running ONTAP 9.10.1 or later for the following FabricPool functionality:
- PUT throttling
- Temperature-sensitive storage efficiency (TSSE).

ONTAP 9.12.1

You must be running ONTAP 9.12.1 or later for the following FabricPool functionality:
- SVM Migrate
- Support for FabricPool, FlexGroup, and SVM-DR working in conjunction. (Prior to 9.12.1 any two of these features worked together, but not all three in conjunction.)

ONTAP 9.14.1

You must be running ONTAP 9.14.1 or later for the following FabricPool functionality:
- Cloud Write
- Aggressive Readahead

Local tiers (aggregates)

FabricPool supports the following aggregate types:

On ETERNUS AX/AC series, you can only use SSD aggregates for FabricPool.
On ETERNUS HX series, you can use either SSD or HDD aggregates for FabricPool.
On Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you can use either SSD or HDD aggregates for FabricPool. Using SSD aggregates is recommended.

Flash Pool aggregates, which contain both SSDs and HDDs, are not supported.

Cloud tiers

FabricPool supports using the following object stores as the cloud tier:

Amazon S3 (Standard, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier Instant Retrieval)
Amazon Commercial Cloud Services (C2S)
Google Cloud Storage (Multi-Regional, Regional, Nearline, Coldline, Archive)
Microsoft Azure Blob Storage (Hot and Cool)
ONTAP S3 (ONTAP 9.8 and later)
StorageGRID (StorageGRID 10.3 and later)

Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Glacier Deep Archive are not supported.

The object store “bucket” (container) you plan to use must have already been set up, must have at least 10 GB of storage space, and must not be renamed.
You cannot detach a cloud tier from a local tier after it is attached; however, you can use FabricPool mirror to attach a local tier to a different cloud tier.

Intercluster LIFs

Cluster high-availability (HA) pairs that use FabricPool require two intercluster LIFs to communicate with the cloud tier. Our company recommends creating an intercluster LIF on additional HA pairs to seamlessly attach cloud tiers to local tiers on those nodes as well.

Disabling or deleting an intercluster LIF interrupts communication to the cloud tier.

Because concurrent SnapMirror and SnapVault replication operations share the network link to the cloud tier, initialization and RTO are dependent on the available bandwidth and latency to the cloud tier. Performance degradation might occur if connectivity resources become saturated. Proactive configuration of multiple LIFs can significantly decrease this type of network saturation.

If you are using more than one intercluster LIF on a node with different routing, our company recommends placing them in different IPspaces. During configuration, FabricPool can select from multiple IPspaces, but it is unable to select specific intercluster LIFs within an IPspace.

Network Time Protocol (NTP)

Network Time Protocol (NTP) configuration is required to ensure the time is synchronized between clusters. Learn about how to configure NTP.

ONTAP efficiencies

Storage efficiencies such as compression, deduplication, and compaction are preserved when moving data to the cloud tier, reducing required object storage capacity and transport costs.

Beginning with ONTAP 9.15.1, FabricPool supports Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT4) which provides more aggressive, and more performant, storage efficiency savings.

Aggregate inline deduplication is supported on the local tier, but associated storage efficiencies are not carried over to objects stored on the cloud tier.

When using the All volume tiering policy, storage efficiencies associated with background deduplication processes might be reduced as data is likely to be tiered before the additional storage efficiencies can be applied.

NetApp console tiering license

FabricPool requires a capacity-based license when attaching third-party object storage providers (such as Amazon S3) as cloud tiers for ETERNUS AX/AC and ETERNUS HX series. A NetApp console Tiering license is not required when using StorageGRID or ONTAP S3 as the cloud tier or when tiering with Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Amazon FSx for ONTAP, or Azure NetApp files.

StorageGRID consistency controls

StorageGRID’s consistency controls affects how the metadata that StorageGRID uses to track objects is distributed between nodes and the availability of objects for client requests. Our company recommends using the default, read-after-new-write, consistency control for buckets used as FabricPool targets.

Do not use the available consistency control for buckets used as FabricPool targets.

Additional considerations for tiering data accessed by SAN protocols

When tiering data that is accessed by SAN protocols, our company recommends using private clouds, like ONTAP S3, due to connectivity considerations.

You should be aware that when using FabricPool in a SAN environment with a Windows host, if the object storage becomes unavailable for an extended period of time when tiering data to the cloud, files on the LUN on the Windows host might become inaccessible or disappear.

Quality of Service

If you use throughput floors (QoS Min), the tiering policy on the volumes must be set to none before the aggregate can be attached to FabricPool.

Other tiering policies prevent the aggregate from being attached to FabricPool. A QoS policy will not enforce throughput floors when FabricPool is enabled.

Functionality or features not supported by FabricPool

Object stores with WORM enabled and object versioning enabled.
Information lifecycle management (ILM) policies that are applied to object store buckets

FabricPool supports StorageGRID’s Information Lifecycle Management policies only for data replication and erasure coding to protect cloud tier data from failure. However, FabricPool does not support advanced ILM rules such as filtering based on user metadata or tags. ILM typically includes various movement and deletion policies. These policies can be disruptive to the data in the cloud tier of FabricPool. Using FabricPool with ILM policies that are configured on object stores can result in data loss.

RAID SyncMirror, except in a MetroCluster configuration
SnapLock volumes when using ONTAP 9.7 releases
Tamperproof snapshots

Tamperproof snapshots provide immutable protections that cannot be deleted. Because FabricPool requires the ability to delete data, FabricPool and snapshot locks cannot be enabled on the same volume.
Tape backup using SMTape for FabricPool-enabled aggregates
The Auto Balance functionality
Volumes using a space guarantee other than none

With the exception of root SVM volumes and CIFS audit staging volumes, FabricPool does not support attaching a cloud tier to an aggregate that contains volumes using a space guarantee other than none. For example, a volume using a space guarantee of volume (-space-guarantee volume) is not supported.

Flash Pool aggregates

ONTAP 9 Manuals ( CA08871-402 )

Requirements for using ONTAP FabricPool