Storage Management - Compaq N2400 - TaskSmart - 1 GB RAM Administration Manual

6-2 Compaq TaskSmart N2400 Administration Guide

Storage Management

The TaskSmart N2400 appliance ships with preconfigured storage settings.
This section is intended to assist in the modification of the storage
configuration. An overview and step-by-step procedures guide you through
creating arrays, pools, and virtual disks. Replacing failed disks and preserving
the appliance fault tolerance are also demonstrated in this section.
The lowest level of storage management on the appliance occurs at the
physical drive level. Physical drives are placed into the external storage
enclosure or enclosures and grouped into RAID arrays for fault tolerance and
better performance. Appendix B "RAID Levels" details the benefits provided
by RAID arrays. The Array Configuration Utility (ACU), a graphical tool,
incorporates a wizard-style interface that creates arrays from the physical
drives.
CAUTION: Existing logical drives must not be deleted prior to deleting the
virtual disks and pools associated with these logical drives. See "Deleting Virtual
Disks and Pools" later in this chapter.
Drive arrays are used to create logical drives, using the ACU. The logical
drives are configured as RAID 5 drives for the most efficient fault-tolerant
performance. Drives can be added to existing arrays at a later time, forming
new logical drives, or they can be added as a new array.
Using Compaq SANworks Virtual Replicator (SWVR), the logical drives
created with the ACU become members of a storage pool. Storage pools
aggregate the disk space from one or more logical disks into a large set of disk
blocks. From the pool of blocks, virtual disks are created, and presented to the
operating system as New Technology File System (NTFS) volumes. Virtual
drives can be enlarged at a later time when there is a need for more space.