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Managing workloads

ONTAP offers a powerful set of tools for managing workloads. In addition to the numerous ways you can shift workloads to other resources (adding controllers, moving volumes or LUNs, scaling up to flash media, and so on), you can use storage quality of service (QoS) to guarantee that performance of critical workloads is not compromised by competing workloads.

  • Identifying remaining performance capacity
    Performance capacity, or headroom, measures how much work you can place on a node or an aggregate before performance of workloads on the resource begins to be affected by latency. Knowing the available performance capacity on the cluster helps you provision and balance workloads.
  • Identifying high-traffic clients or files
    You can use ONTAP Active Objects technology to identify clients or files that are responsible for a disproportionately large amount of cluster traffic. Once you have identified these top clients or files, you can rebalance cluster workloads or take other steps to resolve the issue.
  • Guaranteeing throughput with QoS
    You can use storage quality of service (QoS) to guarantee that performance of critical workloads is not degraded by competing workloads. You can set a throughput ceiling on a competing workload to limit its impact on system resources, or set a throughput floor for a critical workload, ensuring that it meets minimum throughput targets, regardless of demand by competing workloads. You can even set a ceiling and floor for the same workload.