Why didn’t the capacity change on my FSx for ONTAP volume after I changed the volume tiering policy to ALL?

Resolution

You might be in the tiering waiting period

By default, there is a two day waiting period for existing data to be tiered after you change a volume's tiering policy to ALL. The default is set to 2 days unless configured with a different value between 2 and 183. A volume's tiering waiting period sets the amount of time that it takes for data in the SSD tier to be marked as cold.

Data tiering might be affected by available bandwidth on the volume

Tiering operations require network bandwidth and processing by the file server. The tiering rate might change depending on the following factors:

• The throughput capacity of the file system.
• Other activity on the file system.

Your SSD storage tier is at capacity

All data written to a volume is written to the SSD tier first, regardless of the tiering policy. Then, the data is moved to capacity pool storage.

File metadata is always stored on the SSD tier. It's a best practice to expect a 1:10 ratio of data stored on the SSD tier to capacity pool tier for an ALL-tiered volume.

Data tiering stops if your SSD storage tier reaches greater than or equal to 98% used capacity. It's a best practice to keep SSD utilization at 80%. To turn data tiering back on, complete the following steps:

1. Increase the SSD capacity of your file system.
2. Delete existing data so that the SSD storage tier has less than 90% used capacity. Data tiering resumes after this.

If you delete data and your SSD storage tier doesn't change, then you have snapshots that contain the deleted data. To create more free space, delete snapshots.

Related information

Volume data tiering

Choosing the amount of SSD storage capacity