AX4 Flare Disks, own array?

Question

Hi All, We are looking into deploying the new AX4 system. Looks pretty good! I do have a quick query over Disk Array assignment though, With the CX series I would traditionally section of the Flare Disks as a stand alone R5 array, then have the remaining disks as one or more arrays as required by the client.Can you let me know if this is also required for the AX4 enclosure. There is traditionally a performance hit for the first Flare Array set and there is a loss of space by some xGb, is this the same for the AX4? Or should I just be making one big array set and a hot swap disk or two? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks TG

bertog · Accepted Answer

The first four disks of the AX4 contain the array software, much like the first five disks do on a CX or CX3 series array. Their would be some performance hit to RAID Groups (called Disk Pools in Navi Express) and LUNs (called Virtual Disks in Navi Express) created on those disks. There is some loss space on the disks due to the software there, so I don't recommend creating RAID Groups using disks 0-3 + other disks, because the available space on all of them will be lowered to that of the 0-3. You will see a similar warning in the GUI when you are creating Disk Pools.

TonyGent · Answer

Thanks for the fast response Bertog, thats what I thought.
I'll mark the answer as correct and I'll continue to recommend the Flare OS disks have their own raid set.

Any Idea how much the Flare OS takes up on the AX4 (as it's only the Express version, How much am I likely to lose of each drive?

Thanks again.

TG

bertog · Answer

The OS takes up a certain amount of space, and some space is also reserved for a 'vault' to de-stage write cache to in case of a power failure (or any other reason write cache would be disabled). It is roughly 17GB on each of the first four drives.

CLARiiON

Was this post helpful?