More on ECC and Black Boxes

So, I checked it out. The official position is not clear. There's no direct support under VMware ESX, but some components are supported (things like the fibre channel agent etc) but a lot of stuff won't be considered until ESX 3.0. Still waiting for clarification.

I've also been looking at USP configurations on two fronts; first, Virtual Partition Manager (VPM) allow storage resources on a USP to be placed into individual storage partitions (SLPRs). These can be administered separately. We're looking at this for separation of tier 1 and tier 2 storage. I like the idea that both storage ports and cache can be partitioned along with LDEVs to create a separately administerable storage partition. This not only simplifies the administration of multi-tiered storage in a single frame but also protects resources at each level of tiering.

The second USP configuration work involved LDEV layout. Although we ask our customers to consider the USP as a "black box", it clearly isn't and LUN distribution is paramount to obtain best performance, so I've been looking at where we allocate ShadowImage LDEVs. We plan to use higher capacity disks for SI to reduce cost, so disk layout is important. The conclusion is we should keep the primary disk and the SI copy within the same half of the frame, i.e. either on the left or the right as this will give the best performance when replicating data.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm on about, I'll do an entry on the TagmaStore one day, or you can look at the HDS website.