Dell PowerVault ME4 Series Storage System Administrator’s Guide

About pools

A pool is an aggregation of one or more disk groups that serves as a container for volumes. Virtual and linear storage systems both use pools. A disk group is a group of disks of the same type, using a specific RAID level that is incorporated as a component of a pool, that stores volume data. For virtual pools, when volumes are added to a pool the data is distributed across the pool's disk groups. For linear pools, which can only have one disk group per pool, volumes are also added to the pool, which contains the volume data.

In both virtual and linear storage, if the owning controller fails, the partner controller assumes temporary ownership of the pool and resources owned by the failed controller. If a fault-tolerant cabling configuration, with appropriate mapping, is used to connect the controllers to hosts, LUNs for both controllers are accessible through the partner controller so I/O to volumes can continue without interruption.

You can provision disks into disk groups. For information about how provisioning disks works, see Adding a disk group.