Storage Quota Management and Provisioning

with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

April 2022

H10575.16

White Paper

Abstract
Most file systems are a thin layer of organization on top of a block
device and cannot efficiently address data at large scale. This paper
focuses on OneFS, a modern file system that meets the unique needs
of big data. OneFS includes SmartQuotas, a native data management
capability that enables enterprises to reduce storage costs with a
simple-to-use, highly scalable, and flexible storage quota and
provisioning application for scale-out storage environments.

Dell Technologies
 Copyright

The information in this publication is provided as is. Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect
to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular
purpose.
Use, copying, and distribution of any software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.
Copyright © 2022 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other
trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Intel, the Intel logo, the Intel Inside logo and Xeon are trademarks
of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Published in the USA April 2022 H10575.16.
Dell Inc. believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change
without notice.

2 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Contents

Contents
Executive summary.......................................................................................................................4

Overview ........................................................................................................................................5

Architecture ...................................................................................................................................6

SmartQuotas licensing ...............................................................................................................15

Quota notifications......................................................................................................................15

Quota accounting ........................................................................................................................19

Quota reports ..............................................................................................................................23

Quota performance tuning .........................................................................................................28

SmartQuotas best practices and considerations......................................................................29

SmartQuotas and OneFS feature integration ............................................................................31

SmartQuotas use cases ..............................................................................................................32

Conclusion...................................................................................................................................33

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 3

 Executive summary

Executive summary

Overview Unstructured data continues to grow at an astonishing rate, making the need for optimized
file-based data storage and its simplified and automated management more crucial than
ever.

To help enterprises maximize the long-term value of their critical business data and drive
down storage management cost and complexity, Dell PowerScale offers SmartQuotas—a
simple, scalable, and flexible quota management and provisioning software application
that integrates seamlessly with the OneFS operating system.

Audience and This paper presents best practices for deploying and managing storage quotas in a
scope PowerScale cluster. It also offers configuration and tuning recommendations to help
achieve optimal performance for different workloads. This paper does not intend to
provide a comprehensive background to the OneFS architecture.

For more information about the OneFS architecture, see the OneFS Technical Overview
white paper.

The target audience for this white paper is anyone configuring and managing storage
quotas in a OneFS powered clustered storage environment. It is assumed that the reader
has an understanding and working knowledge of the OneFS components, architecture,
commands, and features.

For more information about OneFS commands and feature configuration, see the OneFS
Administration Guide.

Revisions Date Description

November 2013 Initial release for OneFS 7.1

June 2014 Updated for OneFS 7.1.1

November 2014 Updated for OneFS 7.2

June 2015 Updated for OneFS 7.2.1

November 2015 Updated for OneFS 8.0

September 2016 Updated for OneFS 8.0.1

April 2017 Updated for OneFS 8.1

November 2017 Updated for OneFS 8.1.1

February 2019 Updated for OneFS 8.1.3

April 2019 Updated for OneFS 8.2

August 2019 Updated for OneFS 8.2.1

December 2019 Updated for OneFS 8.2.2

June 2020 Updated for OneFS 9.0

September 2020 Updated for OneFS 9.1

4 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Overview

Date Description

April 2021 Updated for OneFS 9.2

September 2021 Updated for OneFS 9.3

April 2022 • Updated template

• Updated for OneFS 9.4

We value your Dell Technologies and the authors of this document welcome your feedback on this
feedback document. Contact the Dell Technologies team by email.

Author: Nick Trimbee

Note: For links to other documentation for this topic, see the PowerScale Info Hub.

Overview
PowerScale SmartQuotas enables administrators to understand, predict, control, and limit
storage usage across their organization and provision a cluster to best meet their storage
needs.

Figure 1. SmartQuotas user quotas

SmartQuotas also facilitates thin provisioning, or the ability to present more storage
capacity to applications and users than is physically present (over-provisioning). Thin
provisioning allows customers to buy and provision storage as they grow rather than
having to make large, speculative purchasing decisions ahead of time.

This paper explores how SmartQuotas can be configured by organizations to establish

storage usage quotas and how these quotas can be enforced. The document also

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 5

 Architecture

illustrates the reporting and notification options available to simplify the management of
scale-out NAS environments and data lakes.

Architecture

Architectural The following table shows the primary elements of SmartQuotas, from the file system
overview point of view:

Table 1. SmartQuotas primary elements (file system point of view)

Element Description

Domain The files and directories that belong to a quota

Resource The quantity being limited

Enforcement Quota limits and what actions are taken when those
thresholds are exceeded

Each quota domain includes a set of usage levels, limits, and configuration options. Most
of this information is organized and managed by the file system and stored in the quota
database. This database is represented in a B-tree structure, known as the quota tree,
and provides both scalability and fast random access. Because of its importance, the
quota database is protected at the highest level for metadata in OneFS. The quota
accounting blocks (QABs) within individual records are protected at the same level as the
associated directory.

Figure 2. SmartQuotas architectural overview

6 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Architecture

The following table outlines the principal parts of a quota domain:

Table 2. Quota domain components

Component Description

Quota domain key Where the unique identifier for the domain is stored.

Quota domain header Contains various state and configuration information that affects
(QDH) the domain as a whole.

Quota domain Manages quota limits, including whether they have been reached
enforcements or exceeded, notification information, and the quota grace period.

Quota domain account Handles tracking of usage levels for the domain. The QDA tracks
(QDA) physical, logical, and file resource types for each domain.

Quota database The quota database (QDB) is a data structure that stores the quota domain record (QDR).
Resource allocation and governance changes are recorded in the quota operation
associated with a transaction, totaled and applied persistently to the QDRs.

Quota domain The QDR stores all configurations and state information associated with a domain. The
record record includes the following components:

Table 3. Quota domain record components

Component Description

Configuration Fields within quota configuration, such as whether the domain is a

container. Despite the name, this includes some state fields like
the Ready flag.

Enforcements A list of quota enforcements, which include the limit, grace period,
and notification state. Although the structure is flexible, only three
enforcements are allowed and only for a single resource.

Account The quota account for the domain.

The following figure shows the on-disk format of the QDR. The structure is dynamic,
based on the configured enforcements and state of the account, so the on-disk structures
look much different than the in-memory structures. Subsequent sections of this paper
further describe the main components.

Figure 3. Quota domain architecture

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 7

 Architecture

Quota domain Quota domain locks synchronize access to quota domain records in the QDB.
locks
The main challenge for quota domain locks is that the need to lock quota domains
exclusively is not known until the accounting is fully determined. In fact, it might not be
until responses from transaction deltas are received before this requirement is reported to
the initiator. To address this challenge, quota domain locks use optimistic restarts.

Constituents and Quota account blocks (QABs) enable high-performance accounting using transaction
quota account deltas. Because the quota usage info is stale when viewed anyway, locking is simplified
blocks by using an exclusive domain lock for coherent reads of usage.

Quota accounts also have a mechanism to avoid hot spots on the nodes storing QABs. It
is quite easy to imagine all nodes in a cluster producing accounting changes in the same
domain, for example when an ALL domain is configured on a top-level directory. This
problem is solved using quota account constituents, which parallelize the accounting to
include additional QABs. Quota performance tuning provides more information.

Quota types SmartQuotas consists of two types of capacity quotas:

• Accounting quotas
• Enforcement quotas

Accounting quotas monitor and report on the amount of storage consumed but do not take
any limiting action or intervention. Instead, they are primarily used for auditing, planning,
or billing purposes. For example, SmartQuotas accounting quotas can be used to:
• Generate reports to analyze and identify storage usage patterns and trends. The
information can then be used to define storage policies for the business.
• Track the amount of disk space used by various users, groups, or departments to
bill each entity for only the storage capacity they actually consume (charge-back).
• Intelligently plan for capacity expansions and future storage needs.

Enforcement quotas, on the other hand, include all the functionality of the accounting
option plus the ability to limit disk storage and send notifications. Using enforcement
limits, you can logically partition a cluster to control or restrict how much storage that a
user, group, or directory can use. For example, you can set capacity limits to ensure that
adequate space is always available for key projects and critical applications and to ensure
that users of the cluster do not exceed their allotted storage capacity.

Optionally, real-time email quota notifications can be sent to users, group managers, or
administrators when they are approaching or have exceeded a quota limit.

SmartQuotas can have one of four enforcement types:

8 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Architecture

Table 4. SmartQuotas enforcement settings

Enforcement setting Description

Hard A limit that cannot be exceeded. If an operation such as a

file write causes a quota target to exceed a hard quota, the
operation fails, an alert is logged to the cluster and a
notification is sent to any specified recipients. Writes
resume when the usage falls below the threshold.

Soft A limit that can be exceeded until a grace period has

expired. When a soft quota is exceeded, an alert is logged
to the cluster and a notification is issued to any specified
recipients. However, data writes are permitted during the
grace period. If the soft threshold is still exceeded when the
period expires, writes are blocked and a hard-limit
notification is issued to any specified recipients.

Advisory An informal limit that can be exceeded. When an advisory

quota threshold is exceeded, an alert is logged to the
cluster and a notification is issued to any specified
recipients. Reaching an advisory quota threshold does not
prevent data writes.

None No enforcement. Quota is accounting only.

All quota enforcement types have both a limit, or threshold, and a grace period. In OneFS
8.2 and later, a soft quota and advisory quota threshold can be specified as a percentage
as well as a specific capacity. For example:
# isi quota quotas create /ifs/quota directory --percent-advisory-
threshold=80 --percent-soft-threshold=90 --soft-grace=1d --hard-
threshold=100G

A hard quota has a zero-time grace period, an advisory quota has an infinite grace period,
and a soft quota has a configurable grace period. When a quota limit and grace period
have been exceeded, client write operations to anywhere within that quota domain will fail
with EDQUOT. Although enforcements are implemented generically in the quota
databases, only one resource may be limited per domain, either logical or physical space.

Even when a hard quota limit is reached, operations are not blocked in certain instances.
These instances include administrative control through root (UID 0), system maintenance
activities, and the ability of a blocked user to free up space.

The following table describes the three SmartQuotas enforcement states:

Table 5. SmartQuotas enforcement states

Enforcement state Description

Under (U) If the usage is less than the enforcement threshold, the
enforcement is in state U.

Over (O) If the usage is greater than the enforcement threshold,

the enforcement is in state O.

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 9

 Architecture

Enforcement state Description

Expired (E) If the usage is greater than the soft threshold, and the
usage has remained over the enforcement threshold
past the grace period expiration, the soft threshold is in
state E. If an administrator modifies the soft threshold
but not the grace period, and the usage still exceeds
the threshold, the enforcement is in state E.

Exceptions to enforcement of quotas include the following scenarios:

• If a domain has only an accounting quota, enforcements for the domain are not
applied.
• Any administrator action may push a domain over quota. Examples include
changing protection, taking a snapshot, and removing a snapshot. The
administrator may write into any domain without obeying enforcements.
• Any system action might push a domain over quota, including repair. OneFS
maintenance processes are as powerful as the administrator.

Governance is the mechanism by which SmartQuotas determines which domains apply to

a given file or directory. After a sequence of domain configuration changes, a persistent
record is required to know where a file had been accounted. As such, quotas use tagging,
and the governing domains are recorded in a dynamic attribute of the inode.

A quota domain account tracks usage and limits of a particular domain. For scalability
reasons, the QDA system dynamically breaks up the quota domain's account of the quota
into some number of quota account constituents (QACs), each of which tracks a part of
the account. Modifications to the account are distributed at random among these
constituents. Each QAC is stored in a set of mirrored quota accounting blocks (QABs).
QABs track quota usage and consist of several level counters for different tracked
resource types and level limits for advisory, soft, and hard quotas.

The quota domain record stores all configuration and state information associated with a
domain. The record can be subdivided into three components:

Table 6. Quota domain record components

Component Description

Configuration Quota configuration

Enforcement Grace period, limit, and notification state

Account Mechanism for space utilization accounting

With SmartQuotas, the primary ways of tracking, enforcing, and reporting resource usage
are as follows:

10 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Architecture

Table 7. SmartQuotas tracking methods

Tracking method Description

Physical size Simple to track because it includes all the data and
metadata resources used, including the data-protection
overhead. The quota system also can track the difference
before and after the operation.

File system logical size Slightly more complex to calculate and track but provides
users with a more comprehensible means of understanding
their usage.

File accounting The most straightforward tracking method, because

whenever a file is added to a domain, the file count is
incremented.

Application logical size Method that reports total logical data store across different
tiers, including CloudPools, to account for the exact file
sizes. This method allows users to view quotas and free
space as an application would view them, in terms of how
much capacity is available to store logical data, regardless
of data reduction or tiering technology.

Before OneFS 8.2, SmartQuotas size accounting metrics typically used a count of the
number of 8 KB blocks required to store file data on a cluster. Accounting based on block
count can result in challenges, such as small file over-reporting. For example, a 4 KB file
would be logically accounted for as 8 KB. Similarly, block-based quota accounting only
extends to on-premises capacity consumption. This means that a 100 MB file stored
within a CloudPools tier is only accounted for as an 8 KB SmartLink stub file, rather than
its actual size.

To directly address this issue, in OneFS 8.2 and later, application logical quotas provide a
new quota accounting metric. Application logical size accounts for, reports, and enforces
on the actual space consumed and available for storage, independent of whether files are
cloud-tiered, sparse, deduplicated, or compressed. Application logical quotas can be
easily configured from the CLI with the following syntax:

# isi quota quotas create <dir> directory –-thresholds-

on=applogicalsize

Legacy quotas created on earlier OneFS versions can easily be converted to use
application logical size after upgrading to OneFS 8.2.

For logical space accounting, some inode attributes, such as ACLs and symbolic links,
are included in the resource count. This uses the same data that is displayed in the
logical size field by the isi get –DD <file> CLI command.

QuotaScan job The QuotaScan job updates quota accounting for domains created on an existing
directory path. Although the job is typically run without any intervention, the administrator
has the option of manually controlling it if necessary or preferred. By default, QuotaScan
runs with a “low” impact policy and a low-priority value of 6.

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 11

 Architecture

If quotas are created on empty directories, governance will instantaneously propagate

from parent to child incrementally. If the directory is not empty, the QuotaScan job is used
to update the governance.

A domain created on a nonempty directory will not be marked as ready, which triggers a
QuotaScan job to be started. QuotaScan is run by the OneFS job engine and is subject to
the general scheduling and prioritization of jobs. The QuotaScan performs a tree walk to
traverse the directory tree under the domain root.

The QuotaScan job is the cluster maintenance process responsible for scanning the
cluster, performing accounting activities to bring the determined governance to each
inode. In essence, the job is a distributed tree walk that is performed based on the state of
the domain.

For more information about the job engine, see the OneFS Job Engine white paper.

Quota domains SmartQuotas is based on the concept of domains—the linchpins of quota accounting.
Since OneFS is a single file system, it relies on domains for defining the scope of a quota
in place of the typical volume boundaries found in most storage systems. As such, a
domain defines which files belong to a quota, accounts for each resource type in that set,
and defines the top-level directory configuration point.

The following table lists the primary SmartQuotas resource types:

Table 8. SmartQuotas resource types

Resource type Description

Directory A specific directory and all its subdirectories

User A specific user

Group All members of a specific group

A domain defined as <name>@<folder> is the set of files under “folder,” owned by

“name,” which could be either a user or a group. The files accounted include all files
reachable from the given path, without traversing any soft links. The owner name can be
ALL; /ifs, the OneFS root directory, is also an effective ALL for “folder.”

With SmartQuotas, you can quickly and easily create traditional domain types by using
ALL. Here are a few examples of domain types:
• All files belonging to user Jane: user:Jane@/ifs
• All files under /ifs/home belonging to any user: ALL@/ifs/home
• All files under /ifs/home belonging to user Jane: user:Jane@/ifs/home

Domains cannot be created on anything but directories. More specifically, domains are
associated with the actual directories themselves, not directory paths. For example, if the
domain is ALL@/ifs/home/data, but /ifs/home/data gets renamed to
/ifs/home/files, the domain stays with the directory.

Domains can also be nested and may overlap. For example, a hard quota is set on
/ifs/data/marketing for 5 TB, and 1 TB soft quotas are then placed on individual

12 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Architecture

users in the marketing department. These quotas ensure that the marketing directory as a
whole never exceeds 5 TB, while the marketing department users are limited to 1 TB
each.

Default quota A default quota domain is one that does not account for any specific set of files but
domains instead specifies a policy for new domains that match a specific trigger. In other words,
default domains are configuration templates for actual domains. SmartQuotas uses the
identity notations default-user, default-group, and default-directory to
describe domains with default policies. For example, the domain default-
user@/ifs/home becomes specific-user@/ifs/home for each specific-user that is
not otherwise defined. All enforcements on default-user are copied to specific-user when
specific-user allocates within the domain and the new inherited domain quota is a “linked
quota”. There may be overlapping defaults (default-user@/ifs and default-
user@/ifs/home may both be defined).

Default quota domains help drastically simplify quota management for large environments
by providing a mechanism to define top-level template configurations from which many
actual quotas are cloned, or linked. When a default quota domain is configured on a
directory, any subdirectories created directly underneath the directory automatically inherit
the quota limits specified in the parent domain. This mechanism streamlines the
provisioning and management quotas for large enterprise environments. Furthermore,
default directory quotas can co-exist with user and/or group quotas and legacy default
quotas.

Figure 4. Default quota domains

Default directory quotas are available in OneFS 8.2 and later, in addition to the default
user and group quotas available in earlier releases.

If the enforcements on a default domain change, SmartQuotas automatically propagates

the changes to the linked quota domains. If a default quota domain is deleted,
SmartQuotas deletes all children marked as inherited. An administrator may also choose
to delete the default quota domain without deleting the children, but this will break
inheritance on all inherited children.

A domain can be in one of three accounting states, as described in the following table:

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 13

 Architecture

Table 9. Domain accounting states

Domain
Description
accounting state

Ready A domain in the ready state is fully accounted. SmartQuotas displays

“ready” domains in all interfaces and all enforcements apply to such
domains.

Accounting A domain is placed in the accounting state when it is waiting on

accounting updates.

Deleting After a request to delete a domain, SmartQuotas places the domain in

the deleting state until tear-down is complete. Domain removal might be
a lengthy process.

SmartQuotas displays accounting domains in all interfaces including usage data but
indicates they are in the process of being “accounted.” SmartQuotas applies all
enforcements to accounting domains, even when it might reject an allocation that would
have proceeded if it had completed the QuotaScan.

Domains in the deleting state are hidden from all interfaces, and the top-level directory of
a domain may be deleted while the domain is still in the deleting state (assuming that no
domains are in a ready or accounting state, defined on the directory). No enforcements
are applied for domains in the deleting state.

A quota scan is performed when the domain is in an accounting state. This can occur
during quota creation to account the new domain, if a quota has been set for the domain,
and quota deletion to un-account the domain. A QuotaScan is required when creating a
quota on a nonempty directory. If quotas are created upfront on an empty directory, no
QuotaScan is necessary.

In addition, a QuotaScan job may be started from the WebUI or from the command-line
interface using the isi job command. Any path specified on the command line is
treated as the root of a tree to be processed. This functionality is provided primarily as a
means to rescan a directory or for maintenance reasons.

Quota daemons The main processes or daemons associated with SmartQuotas are:
• isi_quota_notify_d
• isi_quota_sweeper_d
• isi_quota_report_d

The job of the notification daemon, isi_quota_notify_d, is to listen for “limit exceeded” and
“link denied” events and generate notifications for each. The notification daemon also
responds to configuration change events and instructs the QDB to generate “expired” and
“violated” over-threshold notifications.

A quota sweeper daemon, isi_quota_sweeper_d, is responsible for several quota

housekeeping tasks, such as propagating default changes, collecting domain and
notification rule garbage, and initiating QuotaScan jobs when necessary.

Finally, the reporting daemon, isi_quota_report_d, is responsible for generating quota

reports. Since the QDB produces only real-time resource usage, reports are necessary for

14 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 SmartQuotas licensing

providing point-in-time views of a quota domain’s usage. These historical reports are
useful for trend analysis of quota resource usage.

OneFS 8.2 and later versions also include the rpc.quotad service to facilitate client-side
quota reporting on UNIX and Linux clients using native quota tools. The service, which
runs on tcp/udp port 762, is enabled by default, and control is under NFS global settings.

Also, in OneFS 8.2 and later, users can view their available user capacity set by soft or
hard user and group quotas rather than the entire cluster capacity or parent directory-
quotas. The ability of to view capacity based on quotas allows users to avoid the illusion
of seeing available space that might not be associated with their quotas.

SmartQuotas licensing
SmartQuotas is included as a core component of OneFS but requires a valid product
license key for activation. This license key can be purchased through your Dell
Technologies account team. An unlicensed cluster will show a SmartQuotas warning until
a valid product license has been purchased and applied to the cluster.

License keys can be easily added in the OneFS WebUI at Cluster Management >
Licensing > Activate License.

Quota notifications

Overview A crucial part of the quota system is to provide user notifications regarding enforcement
violations, both when a violation event occurs and while the violation state persists on a
scheduled basis. An enforcement quota may have several notification rules associated
with it. Each notification rule specifies a condition and an action to be performed when the
condition is met. Notification rules are considered part of enforcements. Clearing an
enforcement also clears any notification rules associated with it.

Enforcement quotas support the notification settings, with the following types being
available:

Table 10. Quota notification settings

Quota notification
Description
setting

Global default Uses the global default notification for the specified type of quota.

Custom – basic Enables creation of basic custom notifications that apply to a specific
quota. Can be configured for any or all the threshold types (hard, soft,
or advisory) for the specified quota.

Custom – advanced Enables creation of advanced, custom notifications that apply to a

specific quota. Can be configured for any or all threshold types (hard,
soft, or advisory) for the specified quota.

None Disables all notifications for the quota.

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 15

 Quota notifications

Figure 5. Quota notification setting

Note: With OneFS versions earlier than OneFS 8.2, a quota can have only a single notification
setting.

A quota notification condition is an event that can trigger an action defined by a

notification rule. These notification rules can specify a schedule for performing an action
(for example, “every day at 5:00 AM") or immediate notification of a certain condition.
Examples of notification conditions include:
• When a threshold is exceeded; at most, once every 5 minutes
• When allocation is denied; at most, once an hour
• While over threshold, daily at 2 AM
• While grace period has been expired, weekly, on Sundays at 2 AM

Notifications are grouped within these categories:

• Instant notifications, which include:
 Write-denied notifications that are triggered when a hard threshold denies a
write
 Threshold-exceeded notifications that are triggered at the moment a hard, soft,
or advisory threshold is exceeded.
These instant notifications are one-time notifications because they represent a
discrete event in time.

16 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Quota notifications

• Ongoing notifications: Generated on a scheduled basis to indicate a persisting

condition, such as a hard, soft, or advisory threshold being over a limit or a soft
threshold's grace period being expired for a prolonged period.

Notification Each notification rule can perform either one or none of the following notification actions.
actions
Table 11. Quota notification actions

Quota notification
Description
action

Alert Sends an alert for one of the quota actions

Email Manual Address Sends email to a specific address, or multiple addresses (OneFS
8.2 and later).

Email Owner Emails an owner mapping based on its identity source.

The email owner mapping is as follows:

• Active Directory: Lookup is performed against the domain controller (DC). If the
user does not have an email setting, a configurable transformation from username
and DC fully qualified domain name is performed to generate an email address.
• LDAP: LDAP user email resolution is similar to AD users. In this case, only the
email attribute looked up in the LDAP server is configurable by an administrator
based on the LDAP schema for the user account information.
• NIS: Only the configured email transformation for the NIS fully qualified domain
name is used.
• Local users: Only the configured email transformation is used.

The actual quota notification is handled by a daemon, isi_quota_notify_d, which performs

the following functions:
• Processes kernel notification events that get sent out. They are matched to
notification rules to generate instant notifications (or other actions as specified in
the notification rule).
• Processes notification schedules. The daemon checks notification rules on a
scheduled basis. These rules specify what violation condition will trigger a
notification on a regular scheduled basis.
• Performs notifications based on rule configuration to generate email messages or
alert notifications.
• Manages persistent notification states so that pending events are processed in the
event of a restart.
• Handles rescan requests when quotas are created or modified.

Notification SmartQuotas provides email templates for advisory, grace, and regular notification
email templates configuration, which can be found under /etc/ifs. The advisory limit email template
(/etc/ifs/quota_email_advisory_template.txt) for example, displays:
Subject: Disk quota exceeded

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 17

 Quota notifications

The <ISI_QUOTA_DOMAIN_TYPE> quota on path <ISI_QUOTA_PATH> owned by

<ISI_QUOTA_OWNER> has exceeded the <ISI_QUOTA_TYPE> limit.

The quota limit is <ISI_QUOTA_THRESHOLD>, and <ISI_QUOTA_USAGE> is

currently in use. <ISI_QUOTA_HARD_LIMIT> Contact your system
administrator for details.

An email template contains text and, optionally, variables that represent quota values. The
following table lists the SmartQuotas variables that may be included in an email template.

Table 12. SmartQuotas variables for email templates

Variable Description Example

ISI_QUOTA_DOMAIN_TYPE Quota type. Valid values are: default-directory

directory, user, group, default-
directory, default-user, default-
group

ISI_QUOTA_EXPIRATION Expiration date of grace period Fri Jan 8 12:34:56 PST 2021

ISI_QUOTA_GRACE Grace period, in days 5 days

ISI_QUOTA_HARD_LIMIT Includes the hard limit information You have 30 MB left until you reach
of the quota to make advisory/soft the hard quota limit of 50 MB.
email notifications more
informational

ISI_QUOTA_NODE Hostname of the node on which the us-wa-1

quota event occurred

ISI_QUOTA_OWNER Name of quota domain owner jsmith

ISI_QUOTA_PATH Path of quota domain /ifs/home/jsmith

ISI_QUOTA_THRESHOLD Threshold value 20 GB

ISI_QUOTA_TYPE Threshold type Advisory

ISI_QUOTA_USAGE Disk space in use 10.5 GB

System alerts Various system alerts are sent out to the standard cluster alerting system when specific
events occur. These include:

Table 13. System alert types

Alert type Level Event description

NotifyFailed Warning An attempt to process a notification rule failed externally, such as an

undelivered email.

NotifyConfig Warning A notification rule failed due to a configuration issue, such as a

nonexistent user or missing email address.

NotifyExceed Warning A child quota’s advisory/soft/hard limit is greater than any of parent
quota’s hard limit.

ThresholdViolation Info A quota threshold was exceeded. The conditions under which this alert
is triggered are defined by notification rules.

DomainError Error An invariant was violated, resulting in a forced domain rescan.

18 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Quota accounting

Quota accounting

Overview SmartQuotas has four main resources used in quota accounting:

Table 14. SmartQuotas accounting resources

Accounting resource Description

Physical size Physical size includes all the on-disk storage associated with files and directories,
except for some metadata objects including the LIN tree and snapshot tracking files
(STFs). For deduplicated data and file clones, each file’s 8 KB reference to a
shadow store is included in the physical space calculation.

File system logical size The file system logical size calculation approximates disk usage on typical storage
arrays by ignoring the erasure code, or FEC, protection overhead that OneFS
employs. For regular files, the logical data space is the amount of storage required
to house a particular file if it was 1x mirrored. Logical space also incorporates a
file’s metadata resources.

Application logical size Application logical size reports total logical data store size across different tiers,
including CloudPools. This allows users to view quotas and free space as an
application would view it, in terms of how much capacity is available to store logical
data regardless of data reduction or tiering technology.

Inodes SmartQuotas counts the number of logical inodes, allowing accounting for files
without any ambiguity from hard links or protection.

During quota configuration, these accounting options are available as enforcement limits.
For example, from the OneFS WebUI:

Figure 6. Quota configuration accounting options

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 19

 Quota accounting

Application logical size quotas are available in OneFS 8.2 and later. Existing quotas can
easily be configured to use application logical size upon upgrading from an earlier OneFS
version. The benefits of application logical size quotas include:
• Prevents quota consumption being affected by snapshots, protection overhead,
deduplication, compression, and location of files
• Removes previous limitation where SmartQuotas reported only on-cluster storage,
ignoring cloud consumption
• Presents view that aligns with Windows storage accounting
• Enables accounting and enforcing quota on actual file sizes
• Precisely accounts for small files
• Enables enforcing quotas on a path irrespective of the physical location of file

The following table describes how SmartQuotas accounts for a 1 KB file with the various
datatypes:

Table 15. Quota accounting datatypes

Datatype Accounting

File: physical size Every non-sparse 8 KB disk block that a file consumes, including
protection

File: file system logical size Every non-sparse 8 KB disk block that a file consumes, excluding
protection

File: application logical size Actual size of file (rather than total of 8 KB disk blocks
consumed)

CloudPools file: file system Size of CloudPools SmartLink stub file (8 KB)
logical size

CloudPools file: application Actual size of file on cloud storage (rather than local stub file)
logical size

Directories Sum of all directory entries

Symlinks Data size

ACL and similar Data size

Alternate data stream Each ADS is charged as a file and a container as a directory

The following figure shows each method of accounting for a 1 KB file.

20 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Quota accounting

Figure 7. Quota accounting datatypes

Logical size reports 8 KB, or one block, physical size reports 24 KB (file with 3x mirroring
protection), and application logical shows the actual size of 1 KB.

Other resources encountered during quota accounting include:

• Hard links—Each logical inode is accounted exactly once in every domain to which
it belongs. If an inode is present in multiple domains, it is accounted in multiple
domains. Alternatives such as shared accounting were considered. However, if
inodes are not accounted once in every domain, it is possible for the deletion of a
hard link in one domain to put another domain over quota.
• Alternate data streams (ADS)—A file with an alternate data stream or resource
fork is accounted as the sum of the resource usage of the individual file, the usage
for the container directory, and the usage for each ADS. SmartQuotas handles the
rename of a file with ADS synchronously, even though the ADS container is just a
directory. SmartQuotas stores an accounting summary on the ADS container to
handle renames.
• Directory rename—A directory rename presents a unique challenge to a per-
directory quota system. Renames of directories within a domain are trivial—if both
the source and target directories have the same domain membership, no
accounting changes. However, moving nonempty directories is not permitted when
the SmartQuotas configuration is different on the source and the target parent
directories. If a user trusts the client operating systems to copy files and preserve
all the necessary attributes, then the user may set dir_rename_errno to EXDEV,
which causes most UNIX and Windows clients to do a copy and delete of the
directory tree to affect the move.
• Snapshot accounting—Optionally, a quota domain can also include snapshot
usage in its accounting. SmartQuotas snapshot accounting supports only
snapshots created after the quota domain was created because determining quota
governance (including QuotaScan job) for existing snapshots consumes significant
time and resources. Because most administrators cycle their snapshots through
timed expirations, SmartQuotas will eventually accrue enough accounting
information to include the entire set of relevant snapshots on the system.

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 21

 Quota accounting

Storage quotas SmartQuotas software supports flexible reporting options that enable administrators to
and usage info more effectively manage cluster resources and analyze usage statistics. The goal of
quota reporting is to provide a summarized view of the past or present state of the quota
domainsSmartQuotas supports the following methods of data collection and reporting:
• Scheduled reports—Generated and saved on a regular interval
• Ad hoc reports—Generated and saved per request of the user
• Live reports—Generated for immediate and temporary viewing

A summary of general quota usage info can be viewed from the WebUIat File System >
SmartQuotas > Quotas & Usage.

Figure 8. General quota usage summary

For each quota profile, click View / Edit to see additional information and context:

22 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Quota reports

Figure 9. Quota information

Client-side quota Client-side quota reporting in OneFS 8.2 and later includes:
views • Support for rpc.quotad, which allows NFS clients to view quota consumption for
both hard and soft quotas using the native Linux and UNIX quota CLI utilities.
• The ability to view available user capacity set by soft and/or hard user or group
quotas, rather than the entire cluster capacity or parent directory-quotas.

Quota reports

Overview Quota reports and summaries are typically stored in the

/ifs/.isilon/smartquotas/reports directory. This location is configurable.

Each generated report includes the quota domain definition, state, usage, and global
configuration settings. By default, ten reports and ten summaries are kept at one time,
and older versions are purged. This setting can be configured from the WebUI, by going
to File System > SmartQuotas > Settings:

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 23

 Quota reports

Figure 10. Quota report configuration

On-demand reports can also be created at any time to view the current state of the
storage quotas system. These live reports can be saved manually.

Reports and summaries are prefixed by either ad hoc or scheduled to aid with
identification.

The OneFS CLI export functionality uses the same data generation and storage format as
quota reporting but should not require any extra requirements beyond the three types of
reports. After the collection of the raw reporting data, data summaries can be produced
based on a set of filtering parameters and sorting type.

Reports can be viewed from historical sampled data or a live system. In either case, the
reports are views of usage data at a given time. SmartQuotas does not provide reports on
aggregated data over time (trending reports). However, the raw data can be used by a
quota administrator to answer trending questions.

Quota report A quota report is a timestamped XML file that starts with global configuration settings and
format global notification rules:
# cat scheduled_quota_report_1465786800.xml
<global-config>
<quota-global-config>
<reports>

24 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Quota reports

<schedule-pattern>1100000000|every sunday at 11pm</schedule-

pattern>
<schedule-dir>/ifs/.isilon/smartquotas/reports</schedule-dir>
<schedule-copies>10</schedule-copies>
<adhoc-dir>/ifs/.isilon/smartquotas/reports</adhoc-dir>
<adhoc-copies>10</adhoc-copies>
</reports>
</quota-global-config>
</global-config>
<global-notify>
</global-notify>
<domains>
<domain type="default-group" snaps="0" lin="0x0000000100020006">
<path>/ifs/home</path>
<inactive/>
<enforcements default-resource="logical">
</enforcements>
<notifications use="global"/>
</domain>
<domain type="group" snaps="0" lin="0x0000000100020006" id="0">
<inherited/>
<id-name>wheel</id-name>
<usage resource="physical">109568</usage>
<usage resource="logical">32929</usage>
<usage resource="inodes">6</usage>
<path>/ifs/home</path>
<inactive/>
<enforcements default-resource="logical">
</enforcements>
<notifications use="default"/>
</domain>
<domain type="group" snaps="0" lin="0x0000000100020006" id="10">
<inherited/>
<id-name>admin</id-name>
<usage resource="physical">28160</usage>
<usage resource="logical">8208</usage>
<usage resource="inodes">2</usage>
<path>/ifs/home</path>
<inactive/>
<enforcements default-resource="logical">
</enforcements>
<notifications use="default"/>
</domain>
<domain type="group" snaps="0" lin="0x0000000100020006" id="1800">
<inherited/>
<id-name>Isilon Users</id-name>
<usage resource="physical">1811456</usage>
<usage resource="logical">705620</usage>
<usage resource="inodes">42</usage>
<path>/ifs/home</path>

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 25

 Quota reports

<inactive/>
<enforcements default-resource="logical">
</enforcements>
<notifications use="default"/>
</domain>
<domain type="user" snaps="0" lin="0x0000000100020596" id="2002">
<id-name>nick</id-name>
<usage resource="physical">1001984</usage>
<usage resource="logical">483743</usage>
<usage resource="inodes">12</usage>
<path>/ifs/home/nick</path>
<enforcements default-resource="logical">
<enforcement type="soft" resource="logical">
<limit>10485760</limit>
<grace>7776000</grace>
</enforcement>
<enforcement type="advisory" resource="logical">
<limit>5242880</limit>
</enforcement>
</enforcements>
<notifications>
<quota-notify-map tag="1"></quota-notify-map>
</notifications>
</domain>
</domains>
</quota-report>

Figure 11. XML quota report

Both inode and path, as well as name and ID, are stored with each domain listing. Quota
notification rules are read and inserted into a domain entry only if the domain is not
inherited to avoid any performance impact of reading the quota notification rules with each
domain.

Quota report SmartQuotas can be configured to produce scheduled reports to help monitor, track, and
management analyze storage usage on a OneFS powered cluster.

Quota reports are managed by configuring settings that provide control over when reports
are scheduled, how they are generated, where and how many are stored, and how they
are viewed. The maximum number of scheduled reports that are available for viewing in
the web-administration interface can be configured for each report type. When the
maximum number of reports is stored, the system automatically deletes the oldest reports
to make space for new reports as they are generated.

Creating a quota SmartQuotas can be easily configured to generate a quota report on a specified schedule.
report schedule These settings determine whether and when scheduled reports are generated, and where
and how the reports are stored. Even if scheduled reports are disabled, you can still run
unscheduled reports at any time.

26 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Quota reports

To run unscheduled reports:

1. From the OneFS WebUI, go to File System Management > SmartQuotas >
Settings.
2. (Optional) On the Quota settings page, for Scheduled Reporting, click On.
The Report Frequency option appears.

3. Click Change schedule and select the report frequency that you want to set from
the list.
4. Select the reporting schedule options that you want.
5. Click Save.

Reports are generated according to your criteria and can be viewed in the Generated
Reports Archive.

Generating a In addition to scheduled quota reports, you can generate a report to capture usage
quota report statistics at a point in time. Before you can generate a quota report, quotas must exist and
no QuotaScan jobs can be running.

To generate a quota report:

1. Click File System Management > SmartQuotas > Generated Reports Archive.
2. Under Generated Quota Reports Archive, click Generate a quota report.
3. Click Generate Report.

The new report appears in the Quota Reports list.

Locating a quota You can locate quota reports, which are stored as XML files, and then use your own tools
report and transforms to view them. This task can only be performed from the OneFS command-
line interface, as follows:
1. Open a secure shell (SSH) connection to any node in the cluster and log in.
2. Go to the directory where quota reports are stored.
The default quota report location is:
/ifs/.isilon/smartquotas/reports

If quota reports are not in the default directory, you can run the isi quota
settings command to find the directory where they are stored.

3. At the command prompt, run the ls command.

To view a list of all quota reports in the directory, run the following command:
# ls -a *.xml

To view a specific quota report in the directory, run the following command:
# ls <filename>.xml

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 27

 Quota performance tuning

Quota performance tuning

Within OneFS, quota data is maintained in quota accounting blocks (QABs). Each QAB
contains a large number of quota accounting records, which need to be updated
whenever a particular user adds or removes data from an area of the file system on which
quotas are enabled (quota domain). If a large number of clients are simultaneously
accessing the quota domain, these blocks can become highly contended and a potential
bottleneck. Similarly, if a single client (or small number of clients) consistently makes a
large number of small writes to files within a single quota, write performance could again
be impacted.

To address this issue, quota accounts have a mechanism to help avoid hot spots on the
nodes storing QABs. Quota account constituents (QACs) help parallelize the quota
accounting by including additional QAB mirrors distributed across other nodes in the
cluster.

Configuration is managed through a sysctl, efs.quota.reorganize.qac_ratio,

which increases the number of quota accounting constituents. This provides better
scalability and reduces latencies on heavy create/delete activities when quotas are used.

Using this parameter, the internally calculated QAC count for each quota is multiplied by
the specified value. If a workflow experiences write performance issues, and it has many
writes to files or directories governed by a single quota, then increasing the QAC ratio can
significantly improve write performance.

The sysctl efs.quota.reorganize.qac_ratio can be reconfigured to its maximum

value of 8 from its default value of 1 using the following CLI command:
# isi_sysctl_cluster efs.quota.reorganize.qac_ratio=8

To verify the persistent change, run:

# cat /etc/mcp/override/sysctl.conf | grep qac_ratio
efs.quota.reorganize.qac_ratio=8 #added by script

Although increasing the QAC count through this sysctl can improve performance on write-
heavy quota domains, some amount of experimentation might be required until you find
the ideal QAC ratio value. Adjusting the parameter can adversely affect write
performance, if you apply a value that is too high or if you apply the parameter in an
environment that does not have diminished write performance due to quota contention.

Additionally, OneFS provides a CLI command that can restripe the QABs to improve their
performance:
# isi_restripe_qabs retune

This utility can be run either on demand or periodically to randomly redistribute QABs for
all existing quotas. It does this by ignoring the default rebalance layout and running a
retune layout strategy instead, thereby alleviating the performance impact from an
imbalanced QAB layout.

For more information about OneFS commands and feature configuration, see the OneFS
Administration Guide.

28 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 SmartQuotas best practices and considerations

SmartQuotas best practices and considerations

SmartQuotas SmartQuotas best practices include:

best practices • Avoid creating quotas on the root directory of the default OneFS share (/ifs). A
root-level quota might result in performance degradation.
• Avoid governing a single directory with overlapping quotas, which can degrade
performance.
• Consider using directory quotas to alert you to and constrain runaway jobs,
preventing them from consuming massive amounts of storage space.
• Avoid using enforcement quotas for snapshot-tracking quota domains.
• Before using quota data for analysis or other purposes, verify that no QuotaScan
jobs are running.
• Rather than editing the quota email notification templates directly, copy them from
/etc/ifs to another directory to edit and deploy them.
• If quota reports are not in the default directory, you can run the isi quota
settings reports view command to find the directory where they are stored.
• Use the isi quota quotas notifications disable command to disable all
notifications for a quota.
• Use the following CLI syntax to configure default directory quotas (in addition to
default user and group quotas), available in OneFS 8.2 and later:
# isi quota quotas create –path=</ifs/parent-dir> --
type=default-directory –hard-threshold=<limit>

• Use the TreeDelete job, as follows, to delete directories with quotas (in OneFS 8.2
and later):
# isi job start TreeDelete --paths=</ifs/quota_dir>

SmartQuotas • Do not exceed 500,000 quotas per cluster in OneFS 8.2 and 20,000 quotas per
considerations cluster in earlier releases.
• SmartQuotas schedule notification rules are limited to 20,000.
• In OneFS versions earlier than OneFS 8.2, SmartQuotas only reports the true quota
container size for directory quotas (user and group quotas report the entire file
system size). Beginning with OneFS 8.2, this functionality is extended to user and
group quotas.
• OneFS 8.2 and later versions include NFS quota support, allowing customers to
view quota soft and hard limits using UNIX and Linux-based quota tools (rpc.quotad
protocol).
• With CloudPools data, the quota is calculated based on the size of the data local to
the cluster. For example, for a 100 MB file tiered to a cloud provider, SmartQuotas
would calculate just the size of the local stub file (8 K).
• SmartQuotas reports the logical capacity of the files, whether they are deduplicated
or not.

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 29

 SmartQuotas best practices and considerations

• The QuotaScan job runs after the creation of a quota, but not after a change.
However, it does run on a schedule and incorporates any changes then.
• If two quotas are created on the same directory—for example, an accounting quota
without snapshots and a hard quota with snapshots—the quota without snapshot
data overrules the limit from the quota with snapshot data.
• SmartQuotas also provide a low impact way to provide directory file count reports.
• Configuration changes for linked quotas must be made on the parent quota that the
linked quota is inheriting from. Changes to the parent quota are propagated to all
children. To override configuration from the parent quota, you must first unlink the
quota.
• If a quota type uses the accounting-only option, enforcement limits cannot be used
for that quota.
• Cloned and deduplicated files are treated as ordinary files by quotas. If the quota
includes data-protection overhead, the data-protection overhead for shared data is
not included in the usage calculation.
• Moving quota directories across quota domains is not supported.
• You can edit or delete a quota report only when the quota is not linked to a default
quota.
• A quota can only be unlinked when it is linked to a default quota. Configuration
changes for linked quotas must be made on the parent (default) quota that the
linked quota is inheriting from. Changes to the parent quota are propagated to all
children. If you want to override configuration from the parent quota, you must first
unlink the quota.
• Disabling all quota notifications also disables all system notification behavior. Use
the —clear options to remove specific quota notification rules and fall back to the
system default.
• Beginning with OneFS 8.2, with support for multiple email recipients for notifications
and alerts, the maximum supported size of the email address list (comma
separated) is 1,024 characters. Multi-email notifications can be configured with the
following CLI syntax:
# isi quota notifications create </ifs/quota> directory advisory
exceeded -–action-email-
[email protected],[email protected],[email protected] -–holdoff=0

• Quota containers compartmentalize /ifs, so that a directory with a container

appears as its own separate file system slice. To configure a directory quota with a
4 TB container on /ifs/data/container1, you could use the following CLI
command:
# isi quota quotas create /ifs/data/container1 directory --
hard-threshold 4T --container true

• Only soft or advisory limits can be defined as a percentage of a hard limit. Defining
the same type of limit with both percent-based and absolute is not permitted in a
single request.

30 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 SmartQuotas and OneFS feature integration

• While OneFS 8.2 and later versions support an overall quota limit of up to 500,000,
support for schedule notification rules is still limited to 20,000.

SmartQuotas and OneFS feature integration

Snapshots and In addition to including data-protection overhead, you can opt to include snapshot data
SmartQuotas when calculating a quota’s usage limits.

Figure 12. Quota snapshot reporting

Note: SmartQuotas reports only on snapshots created after the quota domain was created
because determining quota governance (including QuotaScan job) for existing snapshots
consumes significant time and resources. However, as snapshots age out, SmartQuotas will
gradually accrue accounting information for the entire set of relevant snapshots.

For more information, see the OneFS SnapshotIQ white paper.

Data reduction Compressed and deduplicated files appear no differently than regular files to standard
and quota policies. However, for deduplicated files, if the quota is configured to include data-
SmartQuotas protection overhead, the additional space used by the shadow store will not be accounted
for by the quota.

SmartQuotas reports both storage efficiency and data reduction as a ratio across the
dataset as specified in the quota path field. These efficiency and data reduction ratios are
for the full quota directory and its contents, including any overhead, and reflects the net
efficiency of both compression and deduplication.

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 31

 SmartQuotas use cases

Figure 13. Quotas and usage status detailing efficiency ratios

For more information about compression and inline deduplication, see the OneFS In-line
Data Reduction white paper.

For more information about post-process deduplication, see the OneFS SmartDedupe
white paper.

SyncIQ and Quotas are matched one-to-one across the replication set. Multiple quotas are supported
SmartQuotas within a source directory or domain structure, and the target directory is now included in a
quota domain.

During replication SyncIQ ignores quota limits. However, if a quota is over limit, quotas
still prevent users from adding data. SyncIQ will never automatically delete an existing
target quota; instead, the SyncIQ operation will fail. This might occur during an initial
synchronization where the target directory has an existing quota under it, or if a source
directory is deleted that has a quota on it on the target. The quota remains and requires
administrative removal if needed.

For more information, see the OneFS SyncIQ white paper.

CloudPools and Application logical quotas, available in OneFS 8.2 and later, provide a quota accounting
SmartQuotas metric, which accounts for, reports on, and enforces the actual space consumed and
available for storage, independent of whether files are on-premises or cloud-tiered.

SmartQuotas use cases

Scenario 1: Quota management

A university wants to give its students and groups a fixed amount of storage to control and
keep storage growth in check. The storage administrator wants to know how much each
student is consuming and limit storage use. To accomplish this, the storage administrator:
• Sets default user hard or soft quotas
• Configures email alerts to students to encourage self-cleanup of files

32 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas

 Conclusion

Scenario 2: Thin provisioning and scale-out

A company in the media and entertainment industry wants to overprovision storage and
only add capacity when needed. The company buys two 200 TB of capacity for its cluster
and allocates 500 GB to each of 1,000 users—effectively thin provisioning 500 TB. To
enable this, the storage administrator:
• Sets directory quotas for each user with a hard quota of 500 GB each.
• Sets up a system alert to notify the storage administrator to add capacity (nodes)
when the 200 TB is 75 percent full.
• Scales out effectively by adding capacity only when needed.

Scenario 3: HPC compute farm constraining

A semiconductor company uses a large HPC compute cluster for parts of their EDA
workflow, and it wants to guard against runaway jobs for consuming massive amounts of
storage. The company runs heavy computation jobs from a large compute farm against a
“scratch space” directory, housed on an S-node tier on their cluster, and garbage
collection is run at midnight.

Throughout the workday, storage administrators have difficulty tracking storage utilization.
Occasionally, jobs from the compute farm run amok, tying up large swathes of fast,
expensive storage resources and capacity. To help prevent this, the storage
administrator:
• Sets an advisory directory quota on the scratch space at 80 percent utilization for
advanced warning of an issue.
• Configures a hard directory quota to prevent writes at 90 percent utilization.

Conclusion
Traditional systems with volume quotas are limited to a single storage device—and to a
single volume. After setup, volume-level solutions are limited in management flexibility.
For example, typical implementations require the management of quotas across different
volumes, multiple storage systems, and multiple file systems. This approach creates
challenges when making changes to resources, tracking specific users and groups,
moving directory structures, or moving data between file systems and volumes. As more
storage silos are added, the complexity only increases.

OneFS SmartQuotas helps to eliminate these management challenges. By the virtue of

being fully cluster-aware and spanning all nodes, regardless of the cluster size, IT
managers can administer SmartQuotas from a single point of view, provisioning storage
exactly how they want, and changing quota policy options on demand.

Storage administrators can define named quotas for specific individual users or groups, or
they can create default quotas that control disk usage for anyone accessing the cluster.

Administrators can manage storage across their enterprise so that specific users and
groups are allowed to see only the storage that they have been provisioned. Hard, soft,
and advisory limits can be set across the organization for specific users and groups, and

Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas 33

 Conclusion

across the various directory structures. Storage administrators can also configure alerts
and send email notifications to users to advise them that quota limits are approaching,
enforcing hard stops on writes or providing a grace period of several days before
enforcing thresholds. When new users need to be added or directory structures need to
be changed, SmartQuotas allows IT managers to immediately modify their quota policies,
thus easily meeting the changing storage demands of the enterprise.

34 Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas