ATTO Technology VT-Class manual Configuring the Diamond-VT, RAID Level, Virtual Tape Volumes

7.0 Configuring the Diamond-VT

The Diamond-VT can be configured as RAID Level 10 or RAID Level 5 with zones and/or Hot Spare sleds. Partitions are created automatically during configuration of Virtual Tape emulation. The default is a single zone which includes all LUNs (devices), all ports and all hosts. RAID is a storage configuration which uses multiple disk drives to increase capacity, performance and/or reliability.

You may configure your Diamond-VT in several different ways depending on your needs although the Diamond-VT makes some choices for you.

The following elements must be considered when you are configuring your Diamond-VT:

•RAID level

•Interleave

•Number of tape volumes

•Number of tape drives

•Hot Spare sled option

•Zoning

other end to make sure the transmission has not had any errors.

In the Diamond-VT, transmitted data with the added parity data is striped across disk drives. A hardware XOR engine computes parity, thus alleviating software processing during reads and writes.

The Diamond-VT will operate in degraded mode if a drive fails unless you have Hot Spare sleds enabled (see below).

Using the ExpressNAV browser-based interface is the easiest way to set up your Diamond-VT. You may also use the Command Line Interface commands.

CAUTION

Changing these parameters causes all previous drive data on the Diamond-VT to be erased. Make sure you back up all information before setting up a different configuration.

RAID Level 10

RAID Level 10 (mirroring with striping) increases data transfer rates while ensuring security by writing the exact same data simultaneously to two or more different drives. RAID Level 10 is used in applications requiring high performance and redundancy.

RAID Level 5

RAID Level 5 increases reliability while using fewer disks than mirroring by using parity redundancy. Distributed parity on multiple drives provides the redundancy to rebuild a failed drive from the remaining good drives. Parity data is added to the transmitted data at one end of the transaction, then the parity data is checked at the

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Virtual Tape Volumes

When the Diamond-VT is configured as a Virtual Tape, it is divided into several tape volumes and tape drives based on your choice and the RAID level you choose. See Virtual Tape on page 49.

Hot Spare sleds

In most configurations, if a member of a virtual device becomes degraded, you must swap out the faulted sled as defined in Hot Swap Operating Instructions on page 69. If you have not enabled AutoRebuild, you must also start a manual rebuild.

However, you may designate Hot Spare sleds as replacements for faulted sleds without intervention by you or a host. These sleds, once designated as Hot Spares, are not available for other use.

See Optional Hot Spare Sled on page 50 for more

information.

Zones

Zoning is a collection of related Diamond capabilities supporting flexible Diamond-VT configuration management configurable via CLI commands in the Command Line Interface or the

ATTO Technology Inc. Diamond Storage Array Installation and Operation Manual