EMC Storage Pool Deep Dive: Design Considerations & Caveats

Great explain from EMC Storage pool

VIJAY SWAMI

This has been a common topic of discussion with my customers and peers for some time. Proper design information has been scarce at best, and some of these details appear to not be well known or understood, so I thought I would conduct my own research and share.

Some time ago, EMC introduced the concept of Virtual Provisioning and Storage Pools in their Clariion line of arrays. The main idea for doing this is to make management for the storage admin simple. The traditional method of managing storage is to take an array full of disks, create discrete RAID groups with a set of disks, and then carve LUNs out of those RAID groups and assign them to hosts. An array could have dozens to hundreds of RAID groups depending on its size, and often times this would result in stranded islands of storage in these RAID groups. Some of…

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