SAN RAID setup, another lost admin!!

[fontyyy]

Hi guys, only me again wanting you to do my job for me....

Right then, we've now got this DEL CX3-10c and although Dell are going to send someone in (we had no choice about this, you buy the box, you get the "service") to set it up the manual to fill in is nearly written in Greek so I'm having a look at how things work myself, it would appear "they" think I know what the hey I'm doing and what I want.

So this box has got 15 FC drives of 268gb formatted capacity and the vault lives on drives 0-4 taking another 33gig each.

So I'm thinking RAID 5 those 5.

now what, we've got 9 drives (presuming I make a hot spare), what to do with them?

9 in one RAID 5 set? Is this bad?

5 in one RAID 5 set and 4 in another or even RAID 10? I'm loathed to "give away" that much space unless there are good reasons to do so.

We've currently got about a TB of files to go on this SAN along with about a dozen VM's currently on local storage and the rest is for growth.

3 or so TB doesn't look that big now.......

[Steve_Mc]

5 drive R5 on Vault drives is a good idea, and 9 drive R5 with 1 HS is also a good idea for remaining.

When you create the 9 drive Raid Group (RG) you have the option to bind more than 1 LUN from the same RG. True of any RG. You don't need to bind 1 LUN in the RG that consumes all the available space.

With the service is the planning call before the onsite visit. Discuss with the design architect to ensure all considerations are captured.

Steve

[whynotq]

how you set it up will depend on what you want to put on it. R5 the flare drives in a 4+1 that'll give you ~900G useable then you got an 8 + 1 Raid 5 and a Hot Spare or a 4 +1 Raid 5 and 2 + 2 Raid 10 if you need to put some performance DB (SQL/Oracle on it).

I comes down to your requirements really, I did a CX3-20 with 15 x 300 and went with 41 and 81 and HS split the 41 into 2 LUNs and the 81 into 4 LUNs, just meant I could spread the VMs around a bit. you are only looking at 12 VMs so maybe 2 LUNs is enough for you.

go with your gut feeling if there is no valid reson for anything else.