topic Re: Adding disk to EVA8000 in Disk Enclosures

Adding disk to EVA8000

JaySimon — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 12:55:43 GMT

Quick Question we have a EVA8000 with qty 5 146gb disk in each enclosure and want to know can we fill up the rest of the enclosures with 300gb. Will this work as expanding the volumes or do you have to make new volumes for the 300gb disk.

Re: Adding disk to EVA8000

Mark Poeschl_2 — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:40:33 GMT

You can certainly fill up the rest of your enclosures with 300 GB disks.

Whether you can expand existing volumes or create new ones depends on whether you create a new disk group for the 300 GB disks. If you do then you must create new volumes. If you don't then you can go either way. Without knowing a lot more detail about your configuration and application load it's difficult to say which would be the best choice for you, but as an overly broad generalization: fewer disk groups tend to be better.

Re: Adding disk to EVA8000

Rob Leadbeater — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 01:25:13 GMT

Hi Jay,

It might be a quick question, but it's not necessarily a quick answer.

Yes you can add 300GB drives to the enclosures, and yes you can add them to your existing disk group, but having mixed size drives in a group can be interesting. With Single sparing, the EVA will reserve 2 times the size of the largest disk in the group. Therefore adding a small number of large drives could leave you with less available space.

As you're looking at expanding can we assume that your existing disk group is close to capacity ? If so, then you may well have to change the sparing level to none, to be able to group the first few drives - make sure you have a verified backup first, just in case !

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob