Both tenants and namespaces have hard and soft storage quotas:
- hard quota
- An absolute number of bytes. For a tenant, it is the total amount of storage available to that tenant for allocation to its namespaces. For a namespace, it is the total amount of space available for storing objects in that namespace, including object data, metadata (except ACLs), and the redundant data required to satisfy the namespace DPL.Note: HCP checks the amount of data stored in a namespace against the namespace hard quota hourly. If large amounts of data are added rapidly to a namespace, the namespace can store substantially more data than its hard quota allows.
Each namespace managed by a tenant can exceed its hard quota in this way. As a result, the total amount of storage used by all the tenant's namespaces can exceed the hard quota for the tenant.
- soft quota
- The percentage point at which HCP notifies the tenant that allocated storage space is being used up. For a tenant, the soft quota measures the space used in all the namespaces the tenant owns relative to the hard quota for that tenant. For a namespace, the soft quota measures the space used in just that namespace relative to the hard quota for that namespace.
The storage quotas for a tenant are set when the tenant is created. HCP system-level administrators can change these quotas at any time. However, the hard quota for a tenant cannot be set lower than the amount of space the tenant has currently allocated to its namespaces.
The storage quotas for a namespace are set when the namespace is created. You can change these quotas at any time. However, the hard quota for a namespace cannot be set lower than the amount of space currently used in the namespace. And, the total of the hard quotas for all the namespaces owned by a tenant cannot exceed the hard quota for that tenant.