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Sun StorEdge 3000 Family Best Practices Manual • June 2004
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To avoid disruptions to other hosts sharing the same array, do not share a logical
drive among multiple hosts.
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Use either local or global spare drives when creating logical drives. Any free drive
can be designated as a spare and more than one drive can be used as a spare.
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Use dual pathing for each LUN and use Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager software to
provide load balancing across controller ports for increased performance.
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The maximum number of LUNs when using point-to-point protocol is 128 for
single-path configurations and 64 for dual-path configurations.
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Power-up the equipment in the following order:
a. Expansion units
b. RAID array
c. Host computers
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Install Sun SAN Foundation software along with the latest patches and firmware.
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Install Sun Storage Automated Diagnostic Environment (StorADE) 2.3 software.
(See FIN# I0959-1).
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Connect the Ethernet management ports to a private Ethernet network (Sun
Alert# 26464).
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After completing the configuration of a Sun StorEdge 3500 series array, the
configuration should be saved using the firmware “Save nvram to disks” menu
option and the Sun StorEdge Configuration Service Console's “save
configuration” utility.
Configuring an Array’s RCCOM Channel
Redundant controller communication (RCCOM) provides the communication
channels by which two controllers in a redundant RAID array communicate with
one another. This communication allows the controllers to monitor each other, and
includes configuration updates, and control of cache. By default, channels 2 and 3
are configured as DRV + RCCOM (Drive and RCCOM). In this configuration,
RCCOM is distributed over all DRV + RCCOM channels. However, when host
channels remain unused two alternative configurations are available.
Using Four DRV + RCCOM Channels
If only channels 0 and 1 are used for communication with servers, channels 4 and 5
can be configured as DRV + RCCOM, thus providing four DRV + RCCOM channels
(channels 2, 3, 4 and 5). An advantage of this configuration is channels 4 and 5 are
still available for connection of expansion units. The impact of RCCOM is reduced