Planning Needed or not ?

Question

I have more of symmetrix experience where we curve the disk into smaller luns and try to distribute them . With clariion( we are using cx3-80) and boigger drive size , do we need to plan on how we want to curve drives to Raid groups or just keeping on using the disks where ever they are available . Any planning advice in setting up Raid groups. Example , making Raid Groups Using the drives from different DAE's .

AranH1 · Answer

First I recommend the white paper below to provide you with a good reference in regards to designing storage layouts for a CLARiiON. With that being said a CLARiiON still requires a degree of planning to ensure wise use of storage. The array is more flexible than a symmetrix in some aspects in that you can have a mix of architectures; dedicated RAID groups, shared RAID groups, and metaLUNs (similar to symmetrix metas), all existing in the same array and configurable by the end user.

So depending on your performance, capacity, and growth needs there is a variety of options for carving up the storage. But just because it is a much simpler and cheaper array than a comparable DMX don't assume you need to plan less. You still need to plan carefully to ensure you can get the maximum utilization of the storage while meeting your application requirements.

EMC CLARiiON Best Practices for Fibre Channel Storage: CLARiiON Release 24 Firmware Update - Best Practices Planning

or

EMC CLARiiON Best Practices for Fibre Channel Storage: CLARiiON Release 26 Firmware Update - Best Practices Planning

found at:
Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > White Papers > Configuration/Administration

RRR · Answer

The Performance Workshop for Clariion has proven helpful as well.
Where the Symm can handle many many IOps per port, the Clariion is severely limited here, so you might want to some math on the IOps needs of your applications and spread she hosts luns accross the raid groups accordingly.