San drive housekeeping
 

Before I start i know very little about sans and through "political" reasons i refuse to touch ours


is it true that you must defrag san drives like you would a local disk

i thought a san would have built in tools to do things real time with in the san software it self

i have been told that we must split up our user home drive volume as it is taking to long to defrag, which they are doing locally on the server the resourse is attached to

we only have 500gig per volume


this now means i have to split drive mappings etc etc which makes gpo's messy... yes very easy but still messy - are they trying to pull a fast one on me

how do you guys handle user data ?

ok reading the net it seems that regular defags are not needed ( well not like a std file server any way )

but if they were needed im sure theres better ways than scanning the resourse on the server right

im glad i now questioned monthly san downtime :Whatever_

im still interested on the size of your volumes for home drives etc

We use NAS, not SAN, but the biggest volumes are 250Gb and I think 6 volumes per host.
I only mention it as there must have been some engineering reason for the 250 x 6 volumes but I have no idea what that might be :D

so 500gig is a big volume ?

50gb is not a big volume,

Nor is 50TB ;) :D

:) just the point I made

now our san "expert" is saying we need to defrag and any more than 500gb takes to long

now reading up i understad a defarg isn't really worth the hastle but "as he must defrag"

how do people with 5 tb cope .... can you tell i don't trust a word this guuy says

You need to defrag and it does take time, but I think the newer versions of DiskKeeper have some pretty good technology that minimises the impact.

The pain for volume sizes is restore times, that's generally why people try to keep them smaller. If you have to meet SLAs that really helps.

Diskeeper 2007 - EnterpriseServer Edition

ok, i see your point but as we use replication \ snapshots i argued the point about restores

so i was wrong in thinking the san looks after it self locally

i will take a look at diskkeeper cheers

defrag the SAN or defrag the servers 'drives' that sit on the SAN?

What make SAN is it?

David

its a falcon stor

but i would be interested to know what other sans do

:) meeting tomorrow

any more advice