About gatekeeper devices

Hello All,

As Dynamox has already confirmed please go ahead and create more gatekeepers. EMC expects that you will create and assign as many gatekeepers as required by your host and application environment. But the current 3 cylinder count shouldn't be a problem.

The “standard” FBA gatekeeper (GTK) is a 3 or 6 cylinder 2-MIR protected volume.

6 cylinders is recommended in the Solutions Enabler manuals as the minimum size that an Open Systems host can recognize. The 3 cylinder size came into being when the FBA track size doubled (with the introduction of the DMX-3 and Enginuity 5771). The initial Engineering recommendation was to keep the same capacity (rather than cylinder count) with these models but this change would have been confusing from the documentation perspective. This would be especially true of any environment with a mix of both Symm5 or DMX, and DMX-3 or later.

So just F.Y.I

• Any volume smaller than 10 cylinders and non-PowerPath will be automatically flagged by all Enginuity codes (in the syminq response) as a potential “gatekeeper” device.
  
  
• It cannot be a BCV or VCMDB / ACLX device (although the VCMDB / ACLX can act as a standard gatekeeper).
  
  
• They should be non-meta volumes but can be an SRDF device (R1 or R2). The SYMCLI can even use a CKD volume as a gatekeeper.
  
  

So size doesn't matter ... from a SYMCLI functional perspective, but 6 cylinders is the universally recognized GTK size for any EMC configuration person.

Best Regards,

Michael.