New P4000 SAN questions

[Norman Dignard]

We're about to setup our first SAN consisting of 2 P4330 nodes and have a few questions on their setup.

For the CMC , from what I understand, it has to be on the same subnet as the SAN

- Does this have to be be a Windows host?

- Does this host have to be up 24x7 or is this just a config tool for initial setup and maintenance? In other words -can be shutdown, installed on a different host, without impact to the SAN.

ISNS and DNS - If we have Windows AD/DNS services, is this another service to install/setup or can DNS be used in lieu of this?    

SAN spanning multiple nodes interconnection - Its not clear to me from the docs on the setup but is it just a matter of connecting the 2nd node to the same network and configuring its addition using the CMC as part of a management group?

We are newbie's to SANs and still learning this stuff so please excuse my lack of knowledge on this.

The intend of the SAN is 2fold -   boot boot disks for our blades and data storage (Oracle db, files, etc..)

Looking forward to hearing back. If I've made incorrect assumptions please let me know.

Regards

Norm

[Dirk Trilsbeek]

the CMC is just the management tool. And it doesn't have to be in the same subnet as the storage nodes, it just has to be able to access them. So both the system running the CMC and the storage nodes themselves have to be able to reach one another. As the CMC is just a management tool, it doesn't have to run all the time. The nodes themselves have their configuration onboard and manage all failover tasks and error notifications themselves. I don't know if the CMC can be installed on linux, but it is a java application, so it might be possible.

Regarding the connection between the nodes: the nodes have to be able to reach each other and the bandwith and latency should be fast enough as network raid spreads all reads and writes over all nodes in a cluster.

All in all i recommend to play around with the Lefthand VSA virtual appliance in VMWare Workstation or VMWare Player. It's exactly the same software as on the real nodes, you have a long evaluation period to try things (especially trying to break stuff, see how and when volumes become offline...) and get yourself comfortable with the CMC. I haven't tried all the SAN systems out there but i can't imagine a system that would be much simpler to use as the Lefthand systems.