DiskXtender Drive Size and File Count Limits?

The DiskXtender 6.3 documenation lists limits of 2 TB and 25 million files for extended drives. While the file limit appears to be a practical one, is 2 TB a hard limit for extended drives? We have an existing, non-extended 3 TB drive hosting 78 million files. Can this drive be extended directly, or must I split the data onto multiple drives?

Background scans on our existing extended drives already take in the neighborhood of 24 hours to complete, so I'm not overly concerned about adding additional time to the scans. The non-extended drive hosts ApplicationXtender data, so I don't have a lot of flexibility with respect to splitting directories. The two largest ApplicationXtender paths host 31 million and 44 million files, respectively.

As I write this, I suspect I'm not asking the right questions. Our end goal is to migrate away from our existing flat 3 TB drive onto either Centera or a combination of new local storage using DiskXtender/Centera. Migrating existing ApplicationXtender data directly to Centera appears simple, but the layout of our data is quite complex, using a mixture of extended and non-extended drives to host multiple paths for single applications.

Responses(4)

aala20071

23 Posts

0

January 14th, 2010 09:00

From what I have read the 2TB limit is a Microsoft limit. The splitting of the files is something I have never done and I recommend calling EMC support. But all AX information is contained in the SQL DB and has pointers to the images on DX. So in theory as long as you create the new extended drives and keep the DX shares to the same, then all should work. Or you could install a new DX on new hardware, setup your extended drives, point the new system to the Centera and start migrating from the old to the new. This will mean running parallel for a while but it should also do the trick.

Joe_Ab

227 Posts

0

January 26th, 2010 13:00

hi ..

DiskXtender extended drives should meet the following requirements:

Each extended drive should be:

- Formatted as an NTFS volume.

-A local drive on the DiskXtender server.

-The drive must be directly attached to the server by using a block-level protocol such as SCSI or ATA, and it must be mapped as a local drive.

-Not the system drive or a drive where applications are running. Dedicated to files that are managed by DiskXtender.

-A minimum of 100 MB in size (10 GB or more is recommended), with sufficient space planned for future growth.

The maximum size of an extended drive is 2 TB.

A drive that contains (or will contain) no more than 20 million to 25 million files.

from what i got ,, you have to split the the drives , do you have an dmx there , you can use new lun and migrate to clean environment whitout downtime to your production.

Joe_Ab

227 Posts

0

January 26th, 2010 14:00

as i sent "From what i got" your question was nt that clear

what i mentioned to use a temp storage from that DMX if you like to split/work on the current drives.

tscroggins

5 Posts

0

January 26th, 2010 14:00

@Yousef

The information you quoted from the documentation is exactly what I was questioning. We're actually migrating the extended drives from SAN to local storage, which in this case, is much more cost effective. EMC hardware and support is expensive. ;-)

The files are managed by ApplicationXtender, and I can't split the directories on the drivers without making changes to the ApplicationXtender database. I'd very much like to avoid that.

Based on the number of files we're migrating, the extended drive will be ~400 MB--a reasonable size. I'm still concerned about the number of files, but we'll see how it goes.

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