When you create an S3 bucket in an S3-enabled SVM, a FlexGroup volume is automatically created to support the bucket. You can let FlexGroup components automatically (the default) or you can select the underlying aggregates and FlexGroup components yourself.

If you decide to specify the aggregates and FlexGroup components — for example, if you have specific performance requirements for the underlying disks — you should make sure that your aggregate configuration conforms to best practice guidelines for provisioning a FlexGroup volume. Learn more:

If you are serving buckets from Cloud Volumes ONTAP, it is strongly recommended that you manually select the underlying aggregates to ensure that they are using one node only. Using aggregates from both nodes can impact performance, because the nodes will be in geographically separated availability zones and hence susceptible to latency issues. Learn about creating buckets for Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

You can use the ONTAP S3 server to create a local FabricPool capacity tier; that is, in the same cluster as the performance tier. This can be useful, for example, if you have SSD disks attached to one HA pair and you want to tier cold data to HDD disks in another HA pair. In this use case, the S3 server and the bucket containing the local capacity tier should therefore be in a different HA pair than the performance tier. Local tiering is not supported on one-node and two-node clusters.