When deploying NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, which Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) workload characteristic is used to size an application…

When sizing an application with large sequential I/O, the primary performance characteristic is throughput, which measures the rate of data transfer. Megabytes per second (MBps) is the standard unit for throughput. This metric is critical for workloads like streaming, data warehousing, and large file processing, where the goal is to move large blocks of data as quickly as possible. Sizing Cloud Volumes ONTAP for such a workload involves selecting an EC2 instance type and underlying EBS storage that can sustain the required MBps.

capacity: This refers to the total storage size (e.g., in terabytes) and does not describe the I/O performance or speed of the application.

IOPS: Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) is the key metric for small, random I/O workloads, such as transactional databases, not for large sequential workloads.

cpu: This represents the compute processing power of the instance. While important for overall system performance, it is not the direct metric used to characterize the I/O profile.

1. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS Documentation: In the section "Planning your Cloud Volumes ONTAP configuration in AWS," the documentation guides users to select EC2 instance types based on performance requirements, explicitly distinguishing between workloads that require high throughput (MB/s) and those that require high IOPS. This directly aligns with using MBps for sequential workloads.

Source: NetApp Product Documentation, "Choose an AWS instance type and EBS storage".

2. NetApp Technical Report TR-4795: "NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Performance Characterization on Amazon Web Services." This report details performance testing and characterization. It consistently uses throughput (MB/s) as the primary metric for evaluating sequential read and write workloads, while using IOPS for random workloads.

Source: NetApp TR-4795, Section: "Performance Test Results," Pages 10-15.

3. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Resources: The "Sizing Cloud Volumes ONTAP in AWS" section of the official documentation emphasizes that different workloads have different performance needs. It states, "Throughput-intensive workloads require a high data transfer rate (measured in MB/s)."

Source: NetApp Cloud Documentation, "Sizing Cloud Volumes ONTAP in AWS".