Practical Limitations of CIFS file system size

Question

Hello, I have a question about the practical limits of file system size on Celerra NS40G used mainly under CIFS. I know the limit is 16TB but I was wondering about the practical limitations given the nature of our environment where 95% of our files are small files {word DOC|EXCELL Sheets|PPT}. Currently I have 4 file system , each size is 3TB with around 1.8TB data on each file system. A new requirement came to move another 6 TB of data .. I have two choices 1- Extend each one of the four file systems to 5TB , move 1.5 TB of data , that will give 4x5TB file systems with 3.3TB of actual data and the rest is left for future growth. 2- Create 3 new file systems 3TB each , move 1.5TB to the file system with the rest space left for growth. We are at code 6.x . Any practical feedback is much appreciated.

dynamox · Answer

is this with avamar ndmp accelerator ..or you mount CIFS share on a windows box and spin it to Avamar ?

Tru64GUY · Answer

We use AVAMAR to back them up.. It is currently taking aroun d 4hrs for each FS.

dynamox · Answer

we have a couple of 6 TB file systems that are being used for your typical office use (doc, ppt, xls, ..etc). It's all about backup and recovery. How do you back things up ?

carwynedwards · Answer

We've found that we've had to limit the number of home directories we store on any given CIFS share to around 5000 users (University setting) as while the Celerra can happily cope, the NDMP backups slow down considerably when we go any higher. We're using EMC Networker and an LTO4 Library.

Tru64GUY · Answer

We use NDMP.. I wasn`t aware I can use AVAMAR to backup CIFS shares from within windows host..

Tru64GUY · Answer

So the limit you observed is on the number of folders not the sife of the CIFS file system. Do you have numbers on the size of file system that was turning point on the NDMP backup perforemnce.

Celerra

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