DL380 G2 and Storage Array

[Scott Ghaffari]

I am building a server with two Storage works enclosures (each with 13 72 GB HD's). Both are being attached to the DL380 via a Smart Array 5302 controller. I want one external storage array to be a duplicate of the othter (kind of like drive mirroring). Is that possible through hardware means (array config utility), or must this be done by other means>

[Eric_76]

if it is possible I think you would need to buy another peice of hardware to accomplish this... or software.
have not heard of this.. I have heard of 2 server conrolling one storage array for server redundancy but not what you need to do.
Im pretty sure it is out there. But why do this?? Got lots of funds do we??

[Scott Ghaffari]

Yeah, lots of money and the terabyte of data was too hard on our tsm backup server. Figured, why not just have constant online spare. I thought, perhaps through disk manager (win2k), I could click on each of the disk arrays) and choose mirror. I'll have to wait until the two enclosures come in though.

[John Wedderburn]

yes, its possible and it works well.
You can connect the enclosures to both ports of the array controller and mirror across the enclosures....ie RAID0+1 will work. The ACU will call it mirroring. Very fast but very expensive.

[Eric_76]

so if you loose the OS then what??

have you looked at ADG?? and online spare? as far as protecting the data??

have you looked at SAN as a solution??

[Bambos Papadopoulos]

We have a similar setup to this. We have two storage arrays, each connected to a different port on the array controller of a 6400R. Each array has an even number of disks, half of which are a mirror of the other. The arrays are then mirrored, so we only get 25% usable disk space but lots of redundancy (mr. predecessor was v. paranoid). One array has an extra disk to be used as an online spare. If both of your arrays are full then obviously you can't do this. The O/S is installed on a pair of mirrored disks in the server, rather than in the array - you could have aon online spare for this too if you wanted.