MSA2060 Best Practices help

[TechGuy21]

I have an MSA2060 connected iSCSI and am looking for advice

I have 48drives in all 

Presently I have 6-1.8tb ssd drives DGA01 Raid 5
10 2.4tb drive configure Raid6 

These are in a pool group a (I read that the ssd needs to be in a pool so if it fails the data has a place to go?)

The rest of the drives are 31 2.4tb drives in MSA-DP+

Let me know your thoughts, I tried to follow best practices. There is 1 spare for the Raid 6 volume. 

Thanks

[ArunKKR]

Hi,

If I understand  correctly, the Pool A has 2 disk groups - dgA01 with 6 SSD disks in RAID 5 and dgA02 with 10 X 2.4TB standard tier hard drives in RAID 6.

Pool B has a single DP+ disk group with 31 X 2.4TB standard tier hard drives.

There is no mandatory requirement to have standard tier disk group in the same Pool as SSD disks.

If the requirement is to have only performance tier disks in a Pool to achieve maximum performance, you could configure it that way with an SSD disk as global spare.   

I believe you are referring to the below statement from best practices guide "When an SSD drive fails in a disk group, if no matching spare SSD is available for rebuilding the disk group, then to improve data reliability, the data on the SSD disk group drains to an HDD tier."  This is referring to a scenario when SSD disks reach wear out threshold. The assumption is that when one of the disks reaches wear out threshold the other SSD disks also might be nearing the threshold.

[ArunKKR]

Hello  @TechGuy21 !

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[TechGuy21]

@ArunKKR,

I made some changes and used the ninja site to qualify the config. One question I have is in the documentation it says a MSA-DP+ will not use spares, if this is the case why does the config tool force us to set them up?

Thanks

[ArunKKR]

Hi @TechGuy21 ,

DP+uses integrated sparing.

DP+by default reserves space equivalent to 2 X size of the largest disk in the disk groups disks for integrated sparing.

This could be increased or decreased as well.

I wouldn't suggest reducing the sparing below recommended value.

This is different from global spare configuration used with traditional RAID disk groups.

[ArunKKR]

Hello @TechGuy21 !

Let us know if we were able to address your query.

If you are satisfied with the answers then kindly click the "Accept As Solution" button for the most helpful response so that it is beneficial to all community members.