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Re: MSA1000 Expansion - how long does it take?

 
Glasgow Metropolitan
Occasional Contributor

MSA1000 Expansion - how long does it take?

Hi,

Currently have a MSA1000 with 1.5TB storage over 7 300GB disks (1 is hot spare). We wish to expand this by adding another 1.5TB storage (7disks 6+1hot) again using 300GB disks.

Can anybody advise roughly how long this expansion will take for the controller to perform and whether there will be a noticable overhead to file/print services delivered - ie slowdown in disk access.

Is it hours/days/or weeks? Is this advised on a production system?

What happens if there is a power outage during the expansion?

Platform is Netware 6.5 spk 3 if this helps...

Many thanks in advance.
6 REPLIES 6
James Muell
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA1000 Expansion - how long does it take?

If you are planning to 'add' another 1.5tb to the existing array...Wow that's brave. How many luns are on the existing Array? How many hosts are connecting? How long it will take depends on how much data is on the existing array, how much activity the array has from hosts. It would take a long long time even if these are 10K rpm disks production activity will certainly be affected.
If Power outage, then you have a chance of corrupting your data. How long will it take you to restore that data? How long can you be offline?

If you are just adding more disks and creating a new array and additional luns, that should not take long at all. This would be the prudent method.

Glasgow Metropolitan
Occasional Contributor

Re: MSA1000 Expansion - how long does it take?

Hi,

Thanks for responding...

This is a system that I've kinda inherited and they had bought disks ready to expand the SAN when needed.

In short they had planned to expand by 1.5tb basically double the number of disks to 14 and expand the array into the space. This is a file server in use all during the working day and currently has 1tb of data on it. Oh and it's also their production email system as well!

Setup as 3 x 500GB NSS volumes on the one LUN.

The SAN is shared between 3 cluster servers. All your eggs in one basket, don't you just love it!

It does have 10K RPM 300GB disks though!

To be honest, I've already flagged this up as an non-starter to the management, I just wanted some opinions if anybody has done this kind of thing on a live production server before and with what results?

To me it looks like suicide so I've asked them not to go ahead with the expansion with an alternative option of adding the disks to new volumes.

James Muell
Valued Contributor

Re: MSA1000 Expansion - how long does it take?

OK now that's 2 WOWs! This reminds me of the time when i was backup adm and we upgraded 3 exch svrs with 18gb drives, Restored the data and ESutils ran for 20hours! Your senario is just waiting for a disaster becuz all the pieces are there. Good luck stick to your guns.
Vincent Breton_2
Occasional Contributor

Re: MSA1000 Expansion - how long does it take?

We have done this on a MSA1000 with 750Gb adding just 1 drive of 150G in production env. (2 sql srv + 1 file srv) It take near a week to complete...
Patrick Terlisten
Honored Contributor

Re: MSA1000 Expansion - how long does it take?

Hello,

I added some 146GB disks to an MSA1000. This process has taken round about 48h. You should do this in a time with less workload on the MSA. You can change the priority for expanding from low to high.

Regards,
Patrick
Best regards,
Patrick
Jose Chavarria
Advisor

Re: MSA1000 Expansion - how long does it take?

Hi,

The maximum supported Lun size by the controller is 2 TB in the MSA1000, most probably you'll need to create additional Luns. The rebuild/expansion rate is 1 Gb every 15 minutes, depending on the I/O the expansion might take several days or weeks (512 hours for), there is always an impact on the performance of the device during rebuilds or expansions; you can always configure the expansion rate to high to speed up the process but will create a higher impact on the performance of the MSA from the user point of view.

My suggestion is to add the drives and create a new 1.5 TB lun, which will take no more than 5 minutes.