This post is more than 5 years old
21 Posts
0
30544
Increasing drive capacity on EQL PS4000 array
Hello, I work for a school district up in Alaska and I am their server specialist.
We have 3 PS4000 san arrays.
San Group1- Server Farm
-has two PS4000 members, both have 16 drives.
-one array has 16 1TB disks, and the other array has 16 200GB disks
San Group2- Direct Replication target, Pool Storage
-has 1 ps4000 member, configured with 16 1TB drives
What i would like to do is replace the drives in the array that currently has 200gb disks. That would give us the increased capacity i am looking for. My question is if there is anyway to upgrade the drives that would be easier than my process below:
Wipe out san group2 which is our DR target
Replicate all data from the "server farm" to the freshly wiped DR target
upgrade and reconfigure the san with 200 gig drives to 1TB drives
replicate data back from DR target to "server farm" and enjoy extra disk space
I also have another promise array that i plan on duplicating the production data when it is soley stored on the DR target, that way if the pool blew up, we wouldnt lose all our data during the upgrade process :)
Thanks for any advice/comments you can provide!
Sam Powell
Server Specialist
Kodiak Island Borough School District
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
5 Practitioner
•
274.2K Posts
1
March 20th, 2012 13:00
There are a number of possibilities. Depending on how much free space you have in the first group. If there's enough free space you can vacate the member with 200GB drives. It will be reset, add in new Dell/EQL drives and run setup and add it back into group. If not, It might also be possible to rent/borrow an array chassis from your sales rep. Then you can do same process. Shutdown group. Put 200GB drives in loaner chassis and connect to switch and power up. New drives go in your original chassis. Add that to group. vacate out member with 200GB drives.
That's the preferred way.
Re: Replication. How are you planning on replicating from the DR SAN to the Promise array?
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
5 Practitioner
•
274.2K Posts
1
March 20th, 2012 14:00
If the volumes are thin provisioned then it's allocated space. If thick (aka classic) then it's volume size. So you really need to have more space than what that member is currently using. If you haven't already you might want to thin provision the volumes. It might save you some more room. It will be pretty close. Since you always want some unallocated space on the members. (5-10%)
alaskan84
21 Posts
0
March 20th, 2012 13:00
Thanks for the reply/suggestions Don. I am still very new to the whole san architecture. Would you mind elaborating on the "vacate" term? what happens to the data on a member when it is vacated? I do believe we have enough space free on member1 in order to "vacate" member 2 if it automaticlaly moves the data. As far as copying the data from the DR san, to the promise array I hadnt gotten any farther than the inial thought. Are you hinting that it may not be easy/possible?
alaskan84
21 Posts
0
March 20th, 2012 14:00
Thanks for the reply again Don
Would you happen to know when vacating a member, if the full volume space is required on the remaining member, or if only the utilized volume space is required?
say ive got 2.64TB free on member 1
member 2 has 2.71TB total capacity, but only 1.94TB volume utilization.
can i vacate member 2, or do i truly need to have the full capacity available on the remaining member?
thanks very much for your advice Don!
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
5 Practitioner
•
274.2K Posts
1
March 20th, 2012 14:00
"vacating" will move the data on that member to the other member(s) in that same pool. Once that's complete it's deleted from the group. (which resets it back to factory default configuration) If you right mouse over the member to be deleted it will display a menu with "Delete Member". This will start the process to move all the volumes to the other member.