e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

EVA 8000 fired up

While I was in Orlando a couple of weeks ago, our new EVA 8000 arrived. Some of the guys got it on the floor, and I had previously arranged power and connectivity for it.

This morning, we installed Comand View EVA on the management appliance, plugged it in, and fired it up.

Creating disk groups was interesting. Because we have a mix of 146GB 15K and 300GB 10K drives, we wanted to create two disk groups. So the most equitable distribution of the drives has the 146GB drives at the edges of the bays (i.e., in bays 1, 2, 3, 4 and 11, 12, 13, and 14) and the 300GB drives in the middle.

When you create a disk group, you don't get to tell the EVA which drives you want. You just specify how many. For the first disk group, the EVA allocates drives in vertical strips from the left hand side of the bay. Then the second group is allocated from the right hand side. And so on.

So to get our two groups, we could have pulled out all the 300GB drives in the middle and allocated all the remaining drives, but a better way of doing it was to construct a disk group with the first four bays (which in our case was 48 146GB drives), then construct a temporary group of 48 148GB drives, then create a third group of 72 drives that encompassed the 300GB drives in the middle. After this, we deleted the temporary group and added its members to the first disk group, ending up with our required two groups.