How Xsan Storage Is Organized
Although an Xsan volume mounted on a client computer looks like a single disk,
it consists of multiple physical disks combined on several levels using RAID techniques.
The following illustration shows an example of how disk space provided by drive
modules in several RAID systems is combined into a volume that users see as a large
local disk.
RAID arrays
(LUNs)
Data striping
across LUNs
Storage pools
Affinity tags
Folder affinities
SAN volume
Video
Video
Audio
Other
Metada
ta
and jour
nal
Video
Other
Audio
RAID 0
RAID 5
RAID 5
RAID 5
RAID 5
RAID 5
RAID 5
RAID 1
The following paragraphs describe these elements and how you combine them to
create shared Xsan volumes.