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2 Intern

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November 1st, 2013 06:00

Adding drives to Storage Pool - does it matter how many?

Let's say I am building a Storage Pool with 50 drives initially in the "Performance" tier (RAID 5 4+1).  Does it matter if I add all 50 drives at once, or should I add (5) at a time?  I remember a long time ago I was told that whenever a pool is expanded, you were supposed to expand the pool with the same number of drives that you initially built the pool with, so it was recommended to add drives in the smallest increment possible (i.e. 5 drives at a time in this case).  This was probably 2+ years ago, so I am assuming this rule of thumb no longer applies?  In other words, with the current release of VNX OE Release 32/33, is it safe to add 50 drives to a pool, and then later expand it by 10 drives, and then later expand by 5 drives, and so on, without any negative performance impact?

2 Intern

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143 Posts

November 1st, 2013 07:00

Perfect, thanks!

11 Legend

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November 1st, 2013 07:00

in flare 32 data will be re-striped onto new drives during pool expansion, FAST license is not required for pool re-balance during disk add.

11 Legend

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November 1st, 2013 07:00

correct, now that the pool can re-balance itself as long as you add drive counts that are divisible by 5 (for your case of 4+1) you are good.

11 Legend

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November 1st, 2013 07:00

2 Intern

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143 Posts

November 1st, 2013 07:00

Thanks.  How about the case of a customer that does not own the FAST license, and therefore does not benefit from FAST Rebalance operations?  Still safe to build a pool with 50 drives, then later add 10, then add 5, etc.?  Presumably the only "issue" is that new LUNs will be potentially striped across only the new drives, assuming the old drives are "full"?

6 Operator

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8.6K Posts

November 2nd, 2013 03:00

Yes but only once after adding disks

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