PowerScale OneFS 9.2.1.0 CLI Administration Guide

Creating file pool policies

You can configure file pool policies to identify logical groups of files called file pools, and you can specify storage operations for these files.

Before you can create file pool policies, you must activate a SmartPools license, and you must have the SmartPools or higher administrative privilege.

File pool policies have two parts: file-matching criteria that define a file pool, and the actions to be applied to the file pool. You can define file pools based on characteristics, such as file type, size, path, birth, change, and access timestamps, and combine these criteria with Boolean operators (AND, OR).

In addition to file-matching criteria, you can identify a variety of actions to apply to the file pool. These actions include:

• Setting requested protection and data-access optimization parameters
• Identifying data and snapshot storage targets
• Defining data and snapshot SSD strategies
• Enabling or disabling SmartCache

For example, to free up disk space on your performance tier (S-series node pools), you could create a file pool policy to match all files greater than 25 MB in size, which have not been accessed or modified for more than a month, and move them to your archive tier (NL-series node pools).

You can configure and prioritize multiple file pool policies to optimize file storage for your particular work flows and cluster configuration. When the SmartPools job runs, by default once a day, it applies file pool policies in priority order. When a file pool matches the criteria defined in a policy, the actions in that policy are applied, and lower-priority custom policies are ignored for the file pool.

After the list of custom file pool policies is traversed, if any of the actions are not applied to a file, the actions in the default file pool policy are applied. In this way, the default file pool policy ensures that all actions apply to every file.

OneFS also provides customizable template policies that you can copy to make your own policies. These templates, however, are only available from the OneFS web administration interface.