Are HotSpares required for Raid 6?

Fair enough.  I don't mind allocating the hotspares, just wanted to make sure i've been keeping pace.  I've seen the change on the VNXe.  when setting up RAID 6, on that platform the hotspares are not allocated for R6.  It's just not an option.  That is why i ask.

thanks for your response!          

If you consider that a Raid 5 raid group has no better protection than the parity and likely a single hotspare given a small to medium configuration, it seems reasonable to think this way.      

are you willing to take a chance that CE will be onsite to replace "potentially" 2 failed drives before the 3rd one goes out and you lose data ?

definitely need hot spares, what happens when drive 3 fails in raid-6 RG ?

True enough, I intended to state that I would leave them unallocated. Nice update in 33 code

Gabe Heinisch

919-280-7112

True, allocating the drives did prevent people from doing regrettable things. At the end of the day it comes down to training, ownership and proper turnover.

Gabe Heinisch

919-280-7112

on VNX2 you don't "allocate" them per say, but you do "reserve"  them, basically you leave disks unbound so they can be used as a hot spare (granted they meet the requirements to spare for that specific drive type). There is a good section in the paper that goes over the new hot sparing rules in VNX2. New to me as well

honestly i have mixed feelings about this. Probably not a big deal in small shops but in big shops where you have a lot of admins, someone would find unbound drives and go "Hey, i need this raid 1/0 RG, i just found 4 unbound drives ..perfect". Yes Unisphere will generate an alert in the GUI but how often do people not pay attention to those alerts, HS are not even listed as critical ..in my opinion they should be.