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What is MetaLUN?
Written by DuEL Thursday, 12 March 2009 20:19 0 Share

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Meta LUN A MetaLUN is a storage volume consisting of two or more FLARE LUNs whose capacity grows dynamically by adding FLARE LUNs to it. There are several concepts are involved in the process of creating a MetaLUN, the LUN expansion method choose, MetaLUN components, and the component element size.
Note: FLARE LUN A logical partition of a FLARE RAID group. The basic logical units managed by FLARE, which serve as the building blocks for MetaLUN components.

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The advantage of using MetaLUN is that Clariion can expand the size of a LUN. For example, if a host is running out of space on a specific LUN, we can expand the LUN size by adding additional capacity into the LUN that the host are currently access to. By using this method, the host able to grow the LUN size without doing any LUN restructures or allocates additional LUN to the host. The major feature of MetaLUN are when we doing LUN expansion on a RAID Group ( RG ), any volumes will remain the same capacity. There are two type of MetaLUN, stripe or concatenate. Both expansion mechanisms allow for LUN expansion on the fly, so there is no interruption to the host I/O (Input/Output). Stripe MetaLUN (Expansion) Stripe MetaLUN is the process of taking existing data from the LUN that is being expanded and restriping the data across the new LUNs being added. This step doesnt require to create any new component, as the additional LUNs are added the same components as the LUN that being expanded. The user must plan carefully to ensure that during the stripping process duration, the host is on low demand because the restriping process will affect concurrent I/O, increasing the system response time and reducing throughput. The advantage of Stripe expansion is that have more spindles/disks. The EMC Clariion box will stripe the data across all the LUNs in the MetaLUN, the best practice of the Stripe MetaLUN should be on different Raid Groups, on different Buses, so that it will allow the application to be striped across to gained high performance.

Rules of Stripe MetaLUN Expansion

All FLARE LUNs in the stripe component must be same RAID type. All FLARE LUNs in the stripe component must have the same user capacity. All FLARE LUNs in a MetaLUN must reside on the same disk type, either all ATA or Fibre Channel. The graphical below sows that after the restriping process, the data which as contained on FLARE LUN 27 is now spread evenly across all three of the FLARE LUNs in the component. From the following depiction, it show that since we have only conducted striped expansion, hence there is only one component. striped metalun Striped MetaLUN consisting of three FLARE LUNs

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What is MetaLUN? | SAN Storage FAQs | SanDuel.com

http://www.sanduel.com/SAN-Storage-FAQs/What-is-MetaLUN.html

Concatenated MetaLUN (Expansion) Concatenate MetaLUN is a process of appending addition FLARE LUNs to an existing base FLARE LUN or MetaLUN. The different of Stripe MetaLUN and Concatenate MetaLUN are, Cancatenate required new component in the MetaLUN when added additional FLARE LUNs. The data residing on the base LUN remains in place in concatenate expansion. Additional capacity added in this method is available immediately. In Concatenated MetaLUN creation, it can be from different RAID type and different size. Concatenate MetaLUN also have the feature of flexibility in term of attributes the LUNs that compose the MetaLUNs, as the FLARE LUNs can be from different RAID type and capacity. The advantage of Concatenate MetaLUN is that they have the ability to quickly piece together noncontiguous space in this method to allow users to maximize capacity utilization within the same SAN storage array. Rule of Concatenate MetaLUN All FLARE LUNs in a concatenated MetaLUN must be either protected (mirrored or parity) or unprotected. RAID type within a MetaLUN can be mixed. Lets say RAID 5 FLARE LUN can be concatenated with a RAID 5 FLARE LUN. A RAID 0 can be concatenated with another RAID 0, but not with a RAID 5 FLARE LUN. All FLARE LUNs in a concatenated MetaLUN must reside on the same disk-drive type either all ATA or all Fibre Channel. concatenated metalun Concatenated MetaLUN with one FLARE LUN per component

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