Capacity Balancing service

The Capacity Balancing service ensures that the percent of HCP storage space used on the storage nodes in the system remains roughly equivalent across the nodes when new nodes are added.

When the Capacity Balancing service runs, it evaluates the storage level for each node without regard to the individual logical volumes the node manages. If the storage levels for the nodes differ by a wide margin, the service moves objects around to bring the levels closer to a balanced state.

For the purpose of capacity balancing, HCP treats these items as individual objects:

  • Parts of multipart objects
  • Parts of in-progress multipart uploads
  • Chunks for erasure-coded objects
  • Chunks for erasure-coded parts of multipart objects

The Capacity Balancing service runs only when it is started manually. Typically, an authorized HCP service provider starts this service after adding new storage nodes to the system.

NoteThe Capacity Balancing service does not balance the storage space across nodes for data stored in namespaces that have S Series storage set as the ingest tier.