What aggregates are

To support the differing security, backup, performance, and data sharing needs of your users, you can group the physical data storage resources on your storage system into one or more aggregates. You can then design and configure these aggregates to provide the appropriate level of performance and redundancy.

Each aggregate has its own RAID configuration, plex structure, and set of assigned drives or array LUNs. The aggregate provides storage, based on its configuration, to its associated FlexVol volumes.

Aggregates have the following characteristics:

• They can be composed of drives or array LUNs.
• They can be mirrored or unmirrored.
• They can be in 64-bit or 32-bit format.
• If they are composed of drives, they can be single-tier (composed of only HDDs or only SSDs) or they can be Flash Pool aggregates, which include both HDD RAID groups and an SSD cache.

For information about best practices for working with aggregates, see Technical Report 3437: Storage Subsystem Resiliency Guide.