Dell MD3200i, MD3220i Planning: MD3200i Series Storage Array Terms and Concepts

Planning: MD3200i Series Storage Array Terms and Concepts 37

Planning: MD3200i Series Storage

This chapter explains terms and concepts used for configuration and

operation of MD3200i Series storage arrays.

Physical disks in your storage array provide the physical storage capacity for

your data. Before you can begin writing data to the storage array, you must

configure the physical storage capacity into logical components, called disk

groups and virtual disks.

A disk group is a set of physical disks upon which multiple virtual disks are

created. The maximum number of physical disks supported in a disk group is

96 drives for RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID10, and 30 drives for RAID 5 and

RAID 6. You can create disk groups from unconfigured capacity on your

storage array.

A virtual disk is a partition in a disk group that is made up of contiguous data

segments of the physical disks in the disk group. A virtual disk consists of data

segments from all physical disks in the disk group. Virtual disks and disk

groups are set up according to how you plan to organize your data. For

example, you might have one virtual disk for inventory, a second virtual disk

for financial and tax information, and so on.

All virtual disks in a disk group support the same RAID level. The storage

array supports up to 255 virtual disks (minimum size of 10 MB each) that can

be assigned to host servers. Each virtual disk is assigned a Logical Unit

Number (LUN) that is recognized by the host operating system.

Only Dell™ supported 6.0-Gbps SAS physical disks are supported in the

storage array. If the storage array detects unsupported physical disks, it marks

the disk as unsupported and the physical disk becomes unavailable for all

operations.

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