CX4 Heterogeneous Disk Pool without FAST enabler?

Just so that I understand your settings correctly --

1. You do not have FAST enabler installed on your storage system and

2. You selected the option to "Optimize for Pool Performance" in Unisphere.

Is that correct?

Can you provide a screenshot of the Unisphere window where you enable this setting?

Yes, without the FAST enabler, you will be able to only dictate the "Initial Tier Placement" as you have seen.  By setting it to "Optimize for Pool Performance" that means to spread it out across the disks as the numbers suggest taking in consideration the available capacity per tier/percent utilization.  If all your LUNs were set to "Optimize for Pool Performance", you would find the percentages more-or-less stay consistent with the percentage make-up of the pool (from a capacity perspective): %SATA/%FC/%EFD.

As for the deviations you are seeing as you monitor from week to week; this is not the result of tiering existing blocks (as that requires the enabler), but instead the slight variations are coming from new slices that are being allocated for that LUN.  With all this in mind, looking at the breakdown of LUNs 31, 32, and 33, to me, this would be explained as follows (let me preface this by saying, I'm also assuming these are the only LUNs that exist in the pool):

1) You created LUN 31 in the pool when there weren't any EFD disks (thus the 0% for "Flash")

2) Then you expanded the heterogeneous pool with EFD disks

3) You created LUN 32.

Now since capacity utilitization of the tiers is a consideration in the logic when laying down the extents when set to "Optimize for Pool Performance", it will tend to prefer the new drives (EFD's) first (which are 0% utilized), then continue to balance across the pool.  This can be seen with the slightly higher percentage for "last week".  Then to continue with the assumed timeline:

4) You created LUN 33

5) As mentioned above, the slight deviations from last and this week are with the new extents that are being laid out and not the result of any tiering

If you later load the FAST enabler, only then would it tier (either automatically or manually).

Prior to adding these three LUNs to the pool there were 78 LUNs in the pool. SInce then I have added 3 new pool thick LUNS:

Created 3 new LUNs in disk pool with 81 existing LUNs & setting of: "Optimize for Pool Performance"

LUN90 -350GB -  FC=75%  SATA=25%  FLASH=0%

LUN100 -200GB -  FC=14.29  SATA=85.71  FLASH=0%

LUN107 -1500GB - FC-33.33  SATA=66.67  FLASH=0%

Migrated LUNs from traditional RAIDGROUP to these LUNs

At completion of migration, the tier%'s changed as follows:

LUN90 -350GB -  FC=49.16%  SATA=50.56%  FLASH=0.28%

LUN100 -200GB -  FC=45.37% SATA=5415% FLASH=0.49%

LUN107 -1500GB - FC-45.49%  SATA=53.73% FLASH=0.78%

So are you saying that there is some initial "stableization" withing the tiers, but then the LUNs will eventually stablize regardless of how the performance changes?  If that is the case the the only way to improve performance on a LUN would be to create a new thick LUN with the initial setting of "Highest Available Tier" or use a traditional FLARE LUN, then migrate to?

When talking about performance and Pools please see page 15 in the following document:

White Paper EMC CLARiiON Virtual Provisioning  - Applied Technology.pdf

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/White_Paper/H5512-emc-clariion-virtual-provisioning-wp.pdf

glen