What is an Aggregate - Netapp

what is aggregate NetApp

Aggregates are the raw space in your storage system.  you take a bunch of individual disks and aggregate them together into aggregates.  But, an aggregate can’t actually hold data, its just raw space.  you then layer on partitions, which in NetApp land are called volumes.  the volumes hold the data.

what is aggregate NetApp. You make aggregates for various reasons.  For example:
performance boundaries – a disk can only be in one aggregate.  so each aggregate has its own discreet drives.  this lets us tune the performance of the aggregate by adding in however many spindles we need to achieve the type of performance we want.  This is kind of skewed by having Flash Cache cards and such, but its still roughly correct.
Shared Space boundary – All volumes in an aggregate share the hard drives in that aggregate.  there is no way to prevent the volumes in an aggregate from mixing their data on the same drives

Introduction to 32bit and 64bit aggregate

Aggregates are either 64-bit or 32-bit format. 64-bit aggregates have much larger size limits than 32-bit aggregates. 64-bit and 32-bit aggregates can coexist on the same storage system.

32-bit aggregates have a maximum size of 16 TB; 64-bit aggregates’ maximum size depends on the storage system model. For the maximum 64-bit aggregate size of your storage system model.

When you create a new aggregate, it is a 64-bit format aggregate.

You can expand 32-bit aggregates to 64-bit aggregates by increasing their size beyond 16 TB. 64-bit aggregates, including aggregates that were previously expanded, cannot be converted to 32-bit aggregates.

You can see whether an aggregate is a 32-bit aggregate or a 64-bit aggregate by using the aggr status command.