Working With Physical And Logical Disks; Disk Group Configuration - Dell PowerVault MD3200 Series Technical Manualbook

Storage arrays

Hide thumbs Also See for PowerVault MD3200 Series:

Table of Contents

Technical Guide Book for PowerVault MD3200MD3220

Working with Physical and Logical Disks

A disk group is a set of physical disks that the controller

logically groups together to provide one or more virtual

disks to a host. Each disk group is comprised of the

same drive technology (i.e. SAS, near-line SAS or SSD)

and has an assigned RAID level. While multiple RAID

levels can be intermixed in a single MD3200 series

storage array, each disk group has a single RAID level.

The number of physical disks that make up a disk group

can be selected manually or automatically. When using

the MD Storage Manager software's automatic

configuration option, disk groups will be configured

balancing the load across as many physical disk channels

and physical disk modules as possible. This ensures

maximum protection and performance.

MD Storage Manager software also provides the ability to

dynamically add additional physical disks to existing disk

groups. Existing virtual disks are then re-striped across

all physical disks in the newly expanded disk group. This

takes place while the disk group and all its virtual disks

remain online and accessible for I/O.

The selection of the RAID configurations is equally critical for each application to meet the desired data

availability, performance or capacity requirements. And like physical disk types and configuration settings,

the MD3200 series of arrays support the intermixing of RAID configurations to provide maximum flexibility

and utilization. RAID 5 is generally considered the best balance of cost, performance and reliability. The

table below outlines the tradeoffs of the various supported RAID configurations.

Disk Group A

Disk

Table of Contents

Powervault md3220 series