Increasing drive capacity on EQL PS4000 array

Question

Hello, I work for a school district up in Alaska and I am their server specialist.

We have 3 PS4000 san arrays.

San Group1- Server Farm

-has two PS4000 members, both have 16 drives.

-one array has 16 1TB disks, and the other array has 16 200GB disks

San Group2- Direct Replication target, Pool Storage

-has 1 ps4000 member, configured with 16 1TB drives

What i would like to do is replace the drives in the array that currently has 200gb disks. That would give us the increased capacity i am looking for. My question is if there is anyway to upgrade the drives that would be easier than my process below:

Wipe out san group2 which is our DR target

Replicate all data from the "server farm" to the freshly wiped DR target

upgrade and reconfigure the san with 200 gig drives to 1TB drives

replicate data back from DR target to "server farm" and enjoy extra disk space

I also have another promise array that i plan on duplicating the production data when it is soley stored on the DR target, that way if the pool blew up, we wouldnt lose all our data during the upgrade process :)

Thanks for any advice/comments you can provide!

Sam Powell

Server Specialist

Kodiak Island Borough School District

alaskan84 · Answer

Thanks for the reply/suggestions Don. I am still very new to the whole san architecture. Would you mind elaborating on the 'vacate' term? what happens to the data on a member when it is vacated? I do believe we have enough space free on member1 in order to 'vacate' member 2 if it automaticlaly moves the data. As far as copying the data from the DR san, to the promise array I hadnt gotten any farther than the inial thought. Are you hinting that it may not be easy/possible?

alaskan84 · Answer

Thanks for the reply again Don

Would you happen to know when vacating a member, if the full volume space is required on the remaining member, or if only the utilized volume space is required?

say ive got 2.64TB free on member 1

member 2 has 2.71TB total capacity, but only 1.94TB volume utilization.

can i vacate member 2, or do i truly need to have the full capacity available on the remaining member?

thanks very much for your advice Don!

EqualLogic

Increasing drive capacity on EQL PS4000 array

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