User guide

For this volume type’s anity tags used for
user data
Assign LUNs in multiples of
General File Server 2
Home Folder Server 2
Mail Cluster 1
Podcast Producer Cluster 4
Standard Denition Video 4
Uncompressed High Denition Video 4
Assign LUNs that have the same capacity and performance characteristics to each
anity tag.
LUNs that you assign to an anity tag should have the same capacity, because Xsan
provides high performance by using the RAID 0 scheme to stripe data across the LUNs
in each storage pool. This striping scheme can use available space on each LUN equal
to the capacity of the smallest LUN in a storage pool.
If a storage pool’s LUNs vary in size, this can result in wasted capacity. For example,
if a storage pool has a 240 GB RAID array and a 360 GB RAID array, 120 GB of the larger
array won’t be used. By assigning LUNs with similar capacities to an anity tag, you
avoid wasting available storage.
If you’re using a volume type with multiple anity tags for user data, assign your
fastest LUNs to the anity tag associated with folders whose contents benet most
from extra performance. Assign slower LUNs to an anity tag associated with folders
whose contents don’t have critical performance requirements.
You can also increase the performance of an anity tag’s storage pools by assigning
that anity tag a combination of LUNs that are hosted on dierent drive modules
and dierent RAID controllers. This strategy increases performance by increasing the
parallelism of data transfers.
Deciding Which Clients to Mount a Volume On
If you create multiple volumes, decide which volumes should be mounted on which
clients. A new volume is initially mounted on all clients. You can use Xsan Admin to
unmount a volume from selected clients.
Choosing Metadata Controllers
You must choose at least one computer to be the SAN metadata controller, the
computer that is responsible for managing le system metadata.
Note: File system metadata and journal data are stored on the SAN volume, not on the
metadata controller itself. For more information, see “Storing User Data with Metadata
and Journal Data” on page 31.
30 Chapter 2 Planning a Storage Area Network