Dell Storage Manager 2020 R1 Administrator's Guide

Choosing a Strategy for NAS Volume Creation

When you define multiple NAS volumes, you can apply different management policies — such as data reduction, data protection, file security style, and quotas — based on your needs.

Consider the following factors to help choose the right strategy based on your environment’s requirements:

• General requirements
  • NAS volumes can be created, resized (increased or decreased), or deleted.
  • A single NAS volume can contain NFS exports, SMB shares, or a combination of NFS exports and SMB shares.
  • The minimum size of a NAS volume is 20 MB. (If the volume has already been used, the minimum size should be more than the used space or reserved space, whichever is highest.)
• Business requirements – A company or application requirement for separation or for using a single NAS volume must be considered. NAS volumes can be used to allocate storage for departments on demand, using the threshold mechanism to notify administrators when they approach the end of their allocated free space.
• Data reduction – Each NAS volume can have a dedicated data reduction policy to best suit the type of data it stores.
• Snapshots – Each NAS volume can have a dedicated snapshot scheduling policy to best protect the type of data it stores.
• Security style – In multiple-protocol environments, it might be beneficial to separate the data and define NAS volumes with UNIX security style for UNIX/Linux-based clients and NTFS security style for Windows-based clients. This separation enables the administrator to match the security style with business requirements and various data access patterns. The security style can also be set to Mixed, which supports both POSIX security and Windows ACLs on the same NAS volume. When a NAS volume is created, the default file permissions is set to Windows. The settings should be edited immediately after the NAS volume has been created.
• Quotas – Different quota policies can be applied to different NAS volumes, allowing the administrator to focus on managing quotas when it is appropriate.
• Replication schedules – Different volumes can have different replication schedules and policies.
• Auditing SACL SMB Access – Different volumes can have different policies for handling the auditing of SACL SMB accesses.