Chapter 7 - Configuring Network Attached Storage
Create a NAS Storage Pool
Storage Pools
A storage pool groups a set of physical drives together to create a virtual drive that the
operating system treats as a single physical drive. Depending on how it is configured, a
storage pool can provide mirrored, single-parity, double-parity, or triple-parity data
protection. Higher levels of protection allow for more individual drives to fail before the
data is compromised. The costs of higher protection are reduced storage availability and
reduced performance.
Volumes and Shares
Volumes are located on each storage pool. Volumes can be configured with a minimum size
and thin provisioned with a maximum size. When you create a volume, you can specify
whether it uses compression, and whether the time stamp for files is updated when the file is
read (access time).
After the volume is created, it can be shared (made available for use by other computers on
the network) via either the NFS service or the CIFS service.
Naming Considerations
When a volume is shared, the volume mount path uses a combination of the storage pool
name and volume name. The combined name must be less than 78 ASCII characters, or the
volume fails to mount. Additionally, storage pool names are limited to 48 characters, and
volume names are limited to 62 characters. Even if the storage pool name is a single
character, you are still restricted to 62 characters in the volume name.
C
REATE A
NAS S
TORAGE
P
OOL
When creating a new storage pool, keep the following in mind:
• Each storage pool requires a minimum of one drive. Spectra Logic recommends using
eight drives or more in a storage pool to reduce the impact of the overhead. Overhead is
the space on the storage pool used to store parity data, and not used for data storage.
• Drives can only be associated with one storage pool. To create a new storage pool using
drives that are already configured in an existing storage pool, you must first delete the
existing storage pool as described in
Delete a Storage Pool on page 246
. You can then
create a new storage pool using newly available drives.
• Any drives not configured in storage pools act as global spare drives. If a drive failure
occurs, the system immediately activates a global spare. When the failed drive is
replaced it becomes a spare.
• Spectra Logic recommends leaving at least one drive for a global spare.
November 2020
User Guide-BlackPearl Converged Storage System
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