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New Disk Storage Unit, One big partition?

Oyvind_Sonderby
Level 5
Hello

Have bought a new SataBeast 2 disk from Nexsan. The disk have a total of 42 pcs. of 1TB disks. What is best practice? One big large partition or split to 10 partitions?
7 REPLIES 7

dltsc
Level 4
Partner
I would imagine that configuration is fine.  In the past I had a Sun x4540 server that had 46 1TB drives and I just presented it to the media server as one big partition.  Worked fine.

Deeps
Level 6
You can also try to configure them as 10 diffrent disks and put themin a diskpool.

sdo
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Certified
Isn't it all about stripe width?  RAID-4?  RAID-6?  Dual parity?  Diagonal parity?
Does the SataBeast 2 (great name) have an underlying I/O size that cannot be changed?  (e.g. like NetApp WAFL is 4KB block based)
If so, should you make the number of data spindles in your parity group divide evenly by the smallest I/O size supported?  But maybe this angle is unnecessary if the SataBeast storage is addressable by traditional sectors.

Anyone know what the default DSU/DSSU I/O fragment size is for NetBackup?  Is it 1 MB?  If so, maybe you should have the number of data disks in your parity groups be some number that is a power of 2 - e.g. 8 data disk per parity group - or 16 disks per parity group, and then create one LUN in that parity group - so that one NetBackup I/O causes complete stripe writes.

Does the SataBeast 2 do de-dupe?

Can anyone else comment?

Nicolai
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP   
I don't think there that many file system out there that can create one big 46TB file system (ZFS ??). I would create 2 or 4 file system and then use Netbackup disk pools. If possible use VXFS  - netbackup pre-allocate disk space for image files reducing fragmentation to less than 0.5%

I believe the fragment size for DSU/DSSU is 256K (SIZE_DATA_BUFFERS_DISK).

teiva-boy
Level 6
 Create one large array, and use Storage Foundation to manage it all.

If it's windows, dont forget to do a disk alignment.

Jim_Horalek
Level 4
Partner Accredited Certified
 No right or wrong answer. Its  has more to do with how many threads you can get running. OS and drivers can dictate maximum  performance per lun. From a practical point of view I find the ability to destroy and reallocate partitions important. I usually cut a disk into 3-4 partitions. Though a good volume manager can do the same thing. 

Gary_Watson
Level 2
Hi Oyvind,

Most people configure the SATABeast for three or four RAID sets, though we don't restrict you to these options.  Our architecture is 64 bit internally, so we don't restrict you on the maximum size of a LUN created from a RAID set.  Our sales engineers and tech support people in our Derby UK office are pretty good at this stuff so please feel free to contact them for further assistance.

Gary Watson
CTO
Nexsan Technologies