Wanted to get everyones opinion and process with dealing with the above issue.

Maybe some of you have never experienced it. Our process is quite simple, all we do is delete and re-create our FS's to combat file fragmentation. We keep our FS's around 10TB each so we can clean them off in a pinch when required.

Who else practices this, or any other process, or do you not even notice any issues?

glen

This has always been an issue with BlueArc.. Fortunately, with the new Stone FS we are getting closer to a solution... The next release (mid-summer?) should have de-fragmentation implemented...

We were always in the same boat, although our filesystems are much larger so it was a big hassle to move the data to another location format the filesystem and move it back.. Usually we tried to schedule doing this between projects - which nowadays is almost never...

The other issue was if we started to run out of disk space, we needed to add more to the existing one, without hampering performance, again, we would have to move the entire filesystem to another location and do the same as above (adding the new storage after the first move)..

With the new StoneFS we can add disk to an existing volume to expand the filesystem and new files will be written across all the disk (as long as your are not too full) that was one big improvement. Also any files being changed (or rewritten) will also go across all the disks..

-John