where to start

That's the other one I was trying to think of (the Fundamentals doc). I just couldn't come up with it. That one is definitely at the top of the list.

Just make sure you keep copies of the Fundamentals and Best Practices documents on hand as you learn and refer to them regularly. You will find that if you go back and read sections every week or two you will understand more and more of it every time. Your first time through will likely be somewhat painful (but still very important).

Oh, BTW - Welcome to the Forums, and to the wonderful world of EMC Storage

Check also out the new CLARiiON specific support pages:

http://support.emc.com/products/CLARiiONCX3/ArraySoftware.aspx

I would also add to the mix the 'EMC CLARiiON Fibre Channel Storage Fundamentals' and the 'Navisphere Manager help' files. Both are "must read" stuff

Well, if you haven't checked out the Customer Procedure Generator, that would be a great place. Then grab the Connectivity Guides for the platforms (e.g. Windows, AIX, etc.) that you will be connecting. They are VERY thorough.

Beyond that, you should definately read through the CLARiiON Best Practices guide for your FLARE version.

If you have specific questions, people here will be happy to help educate you, but the more you know before asking, the easier it will be to provide answers.

To add with the list, please refer to "NaviSphere Administrator Guide" for all details with in NaviSphere management - like creating Raid Group, LUNs, Storage groups etc.

Also, the Online Help pages in the Navisphere management window are also very helpful.

Let me also join others to Welcome to EMC Support Forums. All the very best ..

Cheers,
Sandip

Interactive Installation Guide is very useful thing for beginners
Home > Support > Product and Diagnostic Tools > CLARiiON Tools > CLARiiON Installation Tools

Awesome, thanks everyone.

Does anyone know where I can find some sort of best practise guide for create raid groups? Or can someone just make some suggestions? I want raid 5 and a hot spare available. Is it best to create a raid set across all available disks? Does that provide best performance or is it best to narrow the disks down a bit?

Well, you will get lots of different opinions on that, most of which start with "It depends"

However, in general (and specific workloads will vary from this), you should probably consider smaller RAID Groups (maybe 4+1) and then build striped MetaLUNs across multiple RAID groups to balance the load. This gives you the advantage of lots of I/O throughput capacity (spreading LUNs over lots of backend disks), balancing traffic on the backend disks (by having multiple MetaLUNs using all the drives), and minimizing rebuild times in the event of a drive failure (by using smaller RAID groups as the base for everything).

This config will not be right for everything, but if you want somewhere to start, and don't have any better ideas, it is better than a lot of things you could possibly do.

Interesting. At first I was thinking of having 1 raid group across all all disks. Then create multiple LUNs. Would this only give me the possibility of multiple drives per one host though, correct?

It would be similar for performance most of the time, but the rebuild times for a failed drive can be longer in a larger RAID group. This can affect your performance for longer than the rebuild times for smaller RAID groups.

MetaLUNs will give you the Read/Write capacity of many spindles (disks) while minimizing rebuild time in the event of a failure.

I did it that way for my MS Exchange 2007 application. 30 disks, 6 Raid groups (4+1), and 3 LUNs per Raid group. Then I took three LUNS from among the RG's and striped them into MetaLUNs. Works like a charm.

Remember that when using metaLUN, try to use different Raid Groups for the component LUNs - using LUNs from the same Raid Group can cause performance issues

glen

Meta's are goooood.

But remember that it's also best practice to have the meta head of those 3 metas on different RG's.
So LUN1 starts on RG1 with members on RG2 and RG3
LUN2 starts on RG2 with members on RG3 and RG1
LUN3 starts on RG3 with members on RG1 and RG2

Or a similar design.

Did somebody already mention you should go horizontal with the MetaLUN RGs...

keep in mind that all the individual lun members of a metalun will be owned by the same SP.