Hi there

I'm pretty new to EQ and just getting my head round the basics at the moment. I've inherited a number of old and new arrays and just wanted to run a few design considerations - thanks in advance for looking. Here's what I've got

3 x PS400E - All 14 x 750GB SATA, connected to a 1GB network, currently only being used as dumb offline storage, all default storage, all one group.
2 x PS6010E - Both 16 x 1TB SATA, connected to a 1GB network located on a different subnet (unused at present)
1 x PS6010X - 16 x 600GB SAS, connected to a 10GB network, located on a different subnet (unused at present)

The three groups above are all located on different subnets on our network, this is what I have in mind - there's no requirement for snapshots or replication at this point.

Group 1
3 x PS400E - Single storage pool configured with RAID10, primarily used to store non-critical VM's and adhoc offline storage
1 x PS6010X - Single storage pool configured with RAID10, used to store critical VM's (Oracle DB etc)

Group 2
2 x PS6010E - Single storage pool configured with RAID10, used to store Novell and Groupwise volumes

Q1
Group 1 will contain members on different subnets, is this possible?

Q2
What are the actual benefits of creating storage pools? Is it purely to separate out different types of data? For instance if on my 3 x PS400E I created 2 storage pools, one for web based VM's and one for application VM's what would be the actual benefit if any, the only thing I can see is a disadvantage in if you ran out of space in one pool.

Is storage pools just a way of ensuring you don't end up mixing different drive speeds?

Thanks