The Dell MD3460 controller array can support up to 120 drives with an MD3060e expansion tray attached. Single drive capacities have been steadily increasing, but transfer speeds have remained fairly constant. As a result, RAID6 rebuild times can exceed 24hrs when using 4TB drives. Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) provide lower rebuild times compared to RAID6 because the parity data hotspare space is spread across all drives in the pool. For the latest Fermi storage configuration, we are benchmarking eight 15-disk DDP volumes on each 120-drive MD3460+MD3060e storage config. Both arrays are dual-attached to a failover pair of servers (fermi-gpfs01,2). In a failover scenario, one machine could serve all sixteen DDP volumes.
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