Benefits
A standard vault using the Name Index Format Version 4 has the following benefits over a standard
vault using Name Index Format Version 2:
- Improved latencies while servicing all the S3 listing requests
- Supports more S3 listing operations.
- Less CPU and disk utilizations on IBM Slicestor devices.
In addition, Name Index Format 4 is a necessary prerequisite for enabling data lifecycle management features including the Object Expiration feature that is also available in this release.
During testing, increased latencies were seen for S3 PUT object requests for some work flows. In
most mixed work flows, the improvements in listing performance are more than enough to offset the
increased cost of writing data using Name Index Format 4 but you may want to conduct experiments
before enabling version 4 as the default on your systems. Considerations that would suggest such a
course of action include:
- Name Index is enabled but the workflow uses minimal S3 Bucket Listing, and includes a large percentage of small object writes.
- The client application is very sensitive to changes in write latency.