• Xsan

    Don't Defrag the Whole SAN

    I see a numer of environments that are running routine defragmentation scripts on Xsan volumes. I do not agree with this practice, but given certain edge cases I have watched it happen. When defragmenting a volume, there is no reason to do so to the entire volume. Especially if much of the content is static and not changing very often. And if specific files doesn’t have a lot of extents then they are easily skipped. Let’s look at a couple of quick ways to narrow down your defrag using snfsdefrag. The first is by specifying the path. In this case you would specify a -r option and follow that with…

  • Xsan

    Xsan: Fragmentation

    Xsan volumes can get fragmented.  This can cause the performance to move to a grinding halt.  Dropped frames, slow copy times, even volume corruption are common side effects.  So, to defrag the volume you can use snfsdefrag.  This command-line tool will defrag volumes or files.  You can even specify what to do with the fragmented data, giving you a way to move data between storage pools…