Dell PowerVault MD3200 Series Technical Manualbook

Also see for PowerVault MD3200 Series: Manual Update Rack Installation Instructions Owner's manual Support Matrix

Contents

Dell PowerVault MD3200 Series Technical Manualbook Manual pdf 35 page image

Technical Guide Book for PowerVault MD3200MD322033background operation with five user-defined priority settings, enabling administrators to minimize eithercopy time or the overall I/O impact to the storage system. As virtual disk copy is controller based, itrequires no host interaction or CPU cycles – minimizing the impact to applications and the storageinfrastructure.Virtual disk copy can be used in conjunction with virtual disk snapshot – which creates a PiT image of avirtual disk while maintaining read / write access – enabling a complete PiT clone to be created withoutinterrupting the I/O activity of the production virtual disk. Additionally, virtual disk copy can be used toredistribute data – moving virtual disks from older, slower disk physical disks to newer, faster, or highercapacity physical disks – to optimize application performance and/or capacity utilization.Online AdministrationThe MD3200 series of storage arrays allows primary storage management tasks to be performed while thestorage remains online with complete read/write data access. This allows storage administrators to makeconfiguration changes, conduct maintenance, or expand the storage capacity without disrupting I/O to itsattached hosts. Online capabilities include:Add Free CapacityCapacity Expansion enables the capacity and number of physical disks to be increased for a given diskgroup. Up to two physical disks at a time can be added to existing disk groups, with the existing virtualdisks then being striped across the full set of physical disks now comprising the disk group.Dynamic ExpansionThis feature enables new drive modules to be added, virtual disk groups to be configured, and virtual disksto be created without disrupting access to existing data. Once a newly created virtual disk is defined, thearray provides immediate virtual disk availability and is enable it to be instantly mapped and accessed by ahost(s).Dynamic Virtual Disk ExpansionThis feature allows for the capacity expansion of an existing virtual disk by using the free capacity on anexisting virtual disk group. And since dynamic virtual disk expansion concatenates (combines) the newcapacity with the original capacity, maximum performance and utilization is assured.Dynamic RAID Level MigrationThis level of migration changes the RAID level of a virtual group on the existing drives, without requiringthe relocation of data. With this dynamic feature, customers can easily adjust RAID levels when theirapplication, availability, or performance needs change.Dynamic Segment Size MigrationWith this feature, the segment size of a given virtual disk can be dynamically changed.Dynamic DefragmentationDynamic defragmentation allows the user to rearrange virtual disks and consolidates free capacity within avirtual disk group resulting in optimized access patterns for existing and newly created volumes.Non-disruptive firmware upgradesEnables controller firmware upgrades to occur with no interruption to data access. The new firmware is