Planning Your SAN
It’s easy to add storage to an existing Xsan SAN, but reorganizing a SAN after you set it
up isn’t simple. So, it’s important to plan the layout and organization of your SAN and
its storage before you set it up.
An Xsan SAN is made up of:
Storage devices (RAID systems)
Â
LUNs (SCSI logical unit numbers, usually RAID arrays)
Â
Storage pools (groups of LUNs)
Â
Affinity tags, which identify storage pools with similar performance and data
Â
protection
Volumes (groups of storage pools visible to users)
Â
Clients (computers that use volumes)
Â
Controllers (computers that manage volume metadata)
Â
An Ethernet network used to exchange volume metadata
Â
A Fibre Channel network used to transfer data to and from volumes
Â
Before you set up a SAN, you must decide how to organize these components.
Take the time to create a diagram or a table that organizes available hardware into
RAID arrays, volumes, client computers, and metadata controllers in a way that meets
SAN users’ needs and your needs as the SAN administrator.
You don’t need to plan your storage pools or affinity tags if you set up each volume
using a preset volume type based on the kind of work the volume supports.