MSA1500 controller

[Harshan Karunaratne]

We are in the process of getting MSA1500cs FC controllers, we will be connecting 3xMSA30 storage enclosures, with 30x300GB disks. We are aware of the OS limitations and lun limitations (2TB). What is the maximum size of the array we can create on this system. For an example can we create all 30 disks on one array and create 2TB luns. What is the limitation of disks per array for this controller?

[Richard Tengdin]

you can create a single disk pool over 56 SCSI drives, but I don't recommend doing that, since your RAID 5 rebuilds will take forever.

There is one fundamental limit on the MSA: you can only expand the last Vdisk in the Storage Pool (if you have more than one volume created)....

A 300 GB drive is good for about 260 GB of formatted space, so 4x300 GB drives will give you 2 TB of space (so a 6 drive pool will give you 2 TB usable with RAID ADG, and 8 drives for RAID 1).

What application(s) are you planning on storing on the array? You may need multiple disk groups to isolate I/O streams to meet performance goals (SQL/Exchange commonly have a separate disk pool for logs...

[Andy_Stor]

I agree with Richard, It is very much dependant that we configure the logical drivers as per the Application requirement otherwise we will face lots of I/O overheads. Also Including more numbers of in a logical drive can increase the MTFB the drives but on the other hand the performance also increases as the spining rate of the logical drives will be more.

Are you planning for high reliability or High Performance setup??

Cheers
Andy