System information

Introduction
1-8
• Configuring the hardware settings and doing health check
After installing your RAID systems with necessary components, like hard disks and transceivers, to your environment,
enabling the user interfaces is a prerequisite if you want to do anything useful to your RAID systems. The only user
interface that you can use without any tools is the LCD console, by which the settings of the RS232 port and the
management network interface can be done to allow you to use the GUI and CLI (see 3.3 Menu on page 3-5).
Now, do a quick health check by examining the GUI monitoring page to locate any mal-functioning components in the
chassis or suspicious events (section 2.2). Follow the hardware manual to do troubleshooting, if needed, and contact
your supplier if the problems still exist. Make sure the links of the host interfaces are up and all installed hard disks are
detected. Since your hard disks will be the final data repository, largely influencing the overall performance and reliability,
it is advised to use the embedded self-test utility and SMART functions to check the hard disks (see 2.8 Hardware
Configurations on page 2-38 ). A better approach would be to use benchmark or stress testing tools.
You need also be sure that all the attached JBOD systems are detected and no abnormal event reported for the
expansion port hardware (see 2.3 SAS JBOD Enclosure Display (for SAS expansion controller only) on page 2-11).
Sometimes, you will need to adjust the hardware parameters, under your supplier’s advices, to avoid potential
interoperability issues.
• Organizing and presenting the storage resources
The most essential configuration tasks of a RAID system are to organize the hard disks using a variety of RAID settings
and volume management functions, and eventually to present them to host systems as LUNs (LUN mapping). This is a
process consisted of both top-down and bottom-up methodology. You see from high-level and logical perspectives of
each host system to define the LUNs and their requirements. On the other hand, you will do configuration starting from
the low-level and physical objects, like grouping the disk drives into disk groups.
Tradeoff analysis is required when choosing RAID levels, like using RAID 0 for good performance but losing reliability, or
using RAID 6 for high reliability but incurring performance penalty and capacity overhead. The appendix provides
information about the algorithms of each RAID level and the corresponding applications. You can also use the embedded
volume management functions to build LUNs of higher performance and larger capacity. The RAID system offers much
flexibility in configurations, like independently-configurable RAID attributes for each logical disk, such that capacity
overhead can be minimized while performance and reliability can still be guaranteed.
You might need to pay attentions to a few options when doing the tasks above, like initialization modes, cache settings,
alignment offset rebuilding mode, and etc. Please read the GUI chapter to know their meanings and choose the most
appropriate settings, because they are directly or indirectly related to how well the RAID system can perform (see 2.6
RAID Management on page 2-16 and 2.7.16 Miscellaneous on page 2-37).
• Installing and launching bundled software (optionally)
The RAID system is equipped with host-side software providing solutions for multi-path I/O, VDS-compliant management,
and centralized management console on multiple platforms. You can locate their sections in the chapter 5 and know their
features and benefits, as well as how to do the installation and configuration. Contact your RAID system supplier to know
the interoperability between the software and the system.
• Getting ready for future maintenance tasks
The better you’re prepared, the less your maintenance efforts would be. Below are the major settings you’ll need for
maintenance.
Event logging and notification
You can have peace only if you can always get timely notifications of incidents happening to your RAID systems, so
completing the event notification settings is also a must-do. You might also need to set the policies for event logging and
notifications (see 2.9 Event Management on page 2-44).
Note
When planning your storage resources, reserving space for snapshot operations is needed. Please
check chapter 5 for information about the snapshot functions.
Note
Installing multi-path I/O driver is a must for redundant-controller systems to support controller
failover/failback. Please check Chapter 5: Advanced Functions for more information about MPIO
and redundant-controller solution.