Hardware manual

Group Administration Storage pools
7–2
–Disk speed
– Member RAID level (RAID 10, RAID 50, RAID 5,
RAID 6)
Recommendation: De
ll recommends that pool members with the same disk spin rate have the same RAID level.
For example, if a pool contains two members that have 7200 RPM disks installed, configure
both members with the same RAID level.
• Disk space and performance needs of each application. Identify which a
pplications deserve priority and
calculate their disk space and network bandwidth needs and performance characteristics. For example, some
applications do many random data transfers, while others do a small number of large sequential data transfers.
In addition, identify rarely-accessed volumes that you use only to archive data.
• How the pools are organized. Identify the number of pools a
n
d the members that belong to each pool, based on
the member performance characteristics and capacities and the requirements of the volumes. For example, you
can organize your pools according to disk speed. You could also organize pools according to member RAID
level.
• Which volumes belong to each pool. Put volumes with
the highest service le
vel requirements in a pool whose
members can provide that service level. If an application uses multiple volumes, those volumes can be in
different pools.
When deciding which volumes belong to a pool, consider the RAID level of the pool
members. See RAID level
characteristics on pa
ge 6-5. If you do not know the optimal RAID level for a volume, make sure that the pool
to which the volume belongs contains members with a variet
y of RAID levels, so automatic performance load
balancing can occur.
Creating a storage pool
Prerequisite: See Configuring a storage pool on page 7-1 to understand how to select the appropriate members for
each pool and then identify the volumes to a
ssign to the pools.
There are two ways to create a storage pool:
• Create an empty pool. You can then assign members to the pool.
• Create a new pool and immediately move a memb
er from
its current pool to the new pool.
When you move a member from one pool to another, the
remaining pool members in the original pool must
enough space to store any volume data that is on the member. Moving a member to a different pool can take a
long time, depending on the amount of data that the group must move.
Requirement: A storage p
ool name can be up to 63 characters. Valid characters include letters, numbers, and
hyphens. The first character must be a letter or number. A pool description can be up to 127
alphanumeric characters.
To create an empty pool:
1. Click
Group, then Storage Pools, and then Create storage pool.
2. In the Create Storage Pool dialog box, specify a pool name and description and click OK.
To create a new pool and immediately move a member to the pool:
1. Click
Group, then expand Members, then select the member name, and then click Modify member
settings.