Suggestion MetaLun or pools for CX4

Have you looked for a White Paper or at the Best Practises .. If you are happy with what is running now then just use the same.

This is a good question.  The right answer however is going to depend on knowledge of your workload, and the state of your MetaLUN.

Generally, a MetaLUN will always have greater performance capability than a pool.  However, a MetaLUN requires design, and maintenance.  If not designed for expansion, scaling a MetaLUN can become a ‘challenge’.  A pool can be expanded very easily, but does not have the highest level of potential performance.

So, if you’re running a high-performance workload against your MetaLUN and you are meeting or barely exceeding your performance requirements; stay with a MetaLUN.  The pool will not be able to match the MetaLUN’s performance.

Now, if your MetaLUN is a pure capacity construct, the pool becomes a more valid option.  This implies your MetaLUN’s performance exceeds its requirements by a comfortable margin.  In particular, if your MetaLUN is nearing its full capacity, migrating it to a pool rather than re-architecting it would likely be less labor-intensive for the future.

However, the move to a new storage system can be hectic.  If your MetaLUN currently has enough capacity for the foreseeable future, and is performing well, there is a lot to be said for keeping it ‘as is’.     

The whitepaper, EMC CLARiiON MetaLUNs in its ‘Virtual provisioning’ section contains a longer discussion of the tradeoffs between MetaLUNs and pools.  That paper is available on Powerlink.