FAS2040 and DS4243 config

[#1]

Hey guys    

We just got a 2040 ( 12 x 450Gb SAS) with a half populated DS4244 ( 12 x 1Gb SATA ) and I'm looking at the best way to config it all and wanted to ask your opion's.

The SAS drives will be used purely in our Xen infrastruction ( 2 x Sen server's connecting via iSCSI ) and the SATA will be CIFS shares.  We want to keep redundancy across the two heads but we also want as much storage as possible.

the DS shelf isn't attached yet ( should be a week or so ) and at the moment we have 6 disks on one head, and 6 disks on another. Both sets of 6 disks are setup using Raid DP.  this is ok, and I can see the great redundancy we get from this, but we don't end up with all that much storage and I wondered what other option's are availble or that you guys could recomment please.

Thanks for any help you can provide,

Stu

[#2]

Hi Stu,

I think you can have one head own the 12 SAS drives and create a 12-disk RAID-DP group. Let the other head own the 12 SATA drives. As long as the pair of heads are configured active/active, you should have the controller redundancy.

What is your throughput requirements?

Thanks,

Wei

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

12x SAS under one head & 12x SATA under the other head sounds like a perfect solution capacity-wise.

There will be some hurdles to jump over though. Say the end goal is to have 12x SAS owned by Head 1 & 12x SATA by Head 2:

- Head 2 root volume needs to be moved from SAS to SATA aggregate (http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel732/html/ontap/sysadmin/GUID-30E20816-CA7D-4C95-AB5D-AE9687793BA0.html)

- then any data from SAS disks owned by Head 2 needs to me migrated off before destroying aggregate, changing disk ownership & attaching them to aggregate on Head 1. This may mean two-hop exercise if there isn't enough capacity under Head 1 (temporary migration to SATA, expanding SAS aggregate, migrating to expanded SAS aggregate)

Regards,

Radek

[#4]

Our existing NAS is a FAS270 and we've been using a single 1Gb nic for traffic so throughput will be acceptable if we have 2 x 1Gb for iSCSI and 2 for CIFS.

On the new setup we'll use 2 of the 4 NIC's for iSCSI, and 2 for CIFS.  The iSCSI traffic is for the SAS disks, ( my XEN server's ) and the CIFS will be going to the SATA.

I just need to confirm that if one head fails, then the other one will take over.  I'm planning on having them active/active.

Moving data isn't a problem as there's nothing on there at all at the moment, its a completely vanila setup.

Cheers

Stu

[#5]

Yes, if one fail, the other will take over. If you don't have any valuable data at the moment, you can test the failover and see how it works.

Thanks,

Wei