Administrator Guide

Managing NAS Volumes
A NAS volume is a subset of the NAS pool in which you create SMB shares and/or NFS exports to make storage space available to clients.
NAS volumes have specic management policies controlling their space allocation, data protection, security style, and so on.
You can either create one large NAS volume consuming the entire NAS pool or divide the NAS pool into multiple NAS volumes. In either
case you can create, resize, or delete these NAS volumes.
NAS volume availability depends on the availability of the Storage Centers. If a Storage Center is oine, storage center LUNs will not be
available for the
FluidFS cluster, and access to the shares and/or exports will be lost. Correct the Storage Center problem to resume
service.
The following NAS features can be congured on each NAS volume:
• File security styles
• Quota rules
• Data reduction
• Snapshots
• NDMP backup
• Replication
File Security Styles
The Windows and UNIX/Linux operating systems use dierent mechanisms for resource access control. Therefore, you assign each NAS
volume a le security style (NTFS, UNIX, or Mixed) that controls the type of access controls (permission and ownership) for the les and
directories that clients create in the NAS volume.
A NAS volume supports the following security styles:
• UNIX – Controls le access using UNIX permissions. A client can change permissions only by using the chmod and chown commands
on the NFS mount point.
• NTFS – Controls le access by Windows permissions. A client can change the permission and ownership using Windows (File
Properties → Security tab).
• Mixed – Supports both NTFS and UNIX security styles. If you choose this option, the default security of a le or directory is the last
one set. Permissions and access rights from one method to another are automatically translated. (For example, if a Windows
administrator sets up le access permissions on a le through an SMB share, a Linux user can access the le system through NFS and
change all the le permissions.) Therefore, this option is not recommended in production environments, except where you are not
concerned about le access security and just need some NAS volume space to store les temporarily.
Both NTFS and UNIX security styles allow multiprotocol le access. The security style determines only the method of storing and managing
the le access permissions information within the NAS volume.
If you need to access the same set of les from both Windows and UNIX or Linux, the best way to implement multiprotocol access is by
setting up individual user mapping rules or by enabling automatic user mapping. Ownership and access permissions are automatically
translated based on user mapping settings and le access credentials.
Modifying the le security style of a NAS volume aects only those les and directories created after the modication.
Thin and Thick Provisioning for NAS Volumes
In addition to the thin provisioning applied to the NAS pool, NAS volumes can be thin‑provisioned. With thin provisioning (the default),
storage space is consumed on the Storage Centers only when data is physically written to the NAS volume, not when the NAS volume is
initially allocated. Thin provisioning oers the exibility to modify NAS volumes to account for future increases in usage. However, because
it is possible for the storage space used by the NAS volumes to exceed the Storage Center space allocated to the NAS pool, you must
monitor available capacity on the Storage Centers to ensure that the
FluidFS cluster always has sucient free space available. You can also
FluidFS Administration
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