The Problem Our team manages a NetApp shared storage cluster holding operational data for approximately 1,500 entities. Each entity has its own directory subtree, split by record type and date, resulting in a tree of roughly 4,500 leaf directories per date. Each leaf directory held tens of small .txt files — each containing a JSON array of records dumped by a backend service — scattered across the tree with no consolidation. The file count had grown to a point where NetApp itself started reporting problems. Inodes were being consumed, quotas were being hit, and our sysadmin was fielding out-of-disk-space errors even after physically expanding the storage. The culprit wasn't raw capacity — it was file count. NetApp, like most enterprise storage systems, tracks files through a fixed inode table. Running out of inodes while having free disk space is a well-known but frequently misunderstood failure mode.…