Flexible Volumes

There are two types of volume in Data ONTAP – FlexVols and Infinite
Volumes
FlexVols are by far the most commonly used. When we talk about
volumes in general, we’re talking about Flexible Volumes
Volumes are the lowest level in the storage architecture that clients
can access data at
Traditional Volumes
With the old traditional volumes there was a one to one relationship
between the volume and its aggregate
If we wanted to resize the volume, we had to physically add or remove
disks from the aggregate
Traditional volumes were deprecated a long time ago
Flexible Volumes
With FlexVols we can have multiple volumes in the same aggregate, we
can allocate more space to the volume than is actually physically
available, and we can non‐disruptively resize and move them
Flexible Volumes
Volumes are the basic building block of data management
They can be non‐disruptively moved or copied between aggregates
They are the unit for replication with SnapMirror or SnapVault
Snapshots are taken at the volume level
Deduplication and compression also work at the volume level
Flexible Volumes
Volumes are specific to a particular Data SVM
Each Data SVM looks like a separate storage system to clients
The namespace of the SVM is formed by joining its volumes together
with junctions, with the SVM root volume at the root of the
namespace