HP AD510A - StorageWorks Modular Smart Array 1500 cs 2U Fibre Channel SAN Attach Controller Shelf Hard Drive, Installation Manual

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Installation procedures—All deployments 22
• When handling hard drives, follow industry-standard practices. Internal storage media can be
damaged when drives are shaken, dropped, or roughly placed on a work surface. When
removing a drive, press the release button, and then pull the drive only slightly out of the
enclosure. Then, to allow time for the internal disk to stop rotating, wait approximately 10
seconds before completely removing the drive from the enclosure.
• If your environment includes multiple servers, HP recommends designating one of the servers as
a management server, to centralize management tasks. It is on this server that you install
management software such as the ACU, and it is from this server that you perform SAN
management tasks.
• When installing or updating HBA drivers, always use the drivers and installation scripts provided
on the MSA Support Software CD and the MSA1500 website. The MSA will not operate as
intended if you update your HBA driver manually or use drivers obtained from the HBA
manufacturer.
• When assigning system names and aliases, use only the following characters:
• Uppercase alpha characters (A-Z)
• Lowercase alpha characters (a-z)
• Numeric characters (0-9)
• Special characters (! # + ( ) ’ ; , . and space)
• If you are connecting the MSA to existing servers, you may need to re-install some of your
management software after installing the MSA.
• In dual-controller multipath configurations (both active/active and active/passive), you must
install some management software (such as multipathing software, management/monitoring
utilities, and array configuration software) on each server with access to the MSA.
• When planning and configuring the LUNs:
• In direct-connect environments or any environment using the ACU-CLI, a minimum of one
storage LUN on the MSA must be configured and set to the appropriate host mode before
connecting the MSA to the server.
• When determining how many hard drives to include in an array and how many LUNs to
create from that array, consider the I/O load of the data that will be stored on those LUNs,
and, also consider that rebuild and expansion times increase with the number of drives.
• Optimize performance and redundancy by striping the drives in the array across separate
storage enclosures on different SCSI buses, especially in mirrored environments using RAID 1
or RAID 1+0.
• In general, striping an array across many hard drives increases the total throughput on that
array and delivers better I/O performance, but there is a performance trade-off when an
array is divided into multiple LUNs. Too many LUNs on the same group of hard drives causes
more drive seeking and a loss of throughput.