About storage provisioning and management

When you provision storage, you want to be able to assign the appropriate storage for the particular application. Access Appliance supports a variety of storage types. To help the users that provision the storage to select the appropriate storage, you classify the storage into groups called storage pools. A storage pool is a user-defined way to group the disks that have similar characteristics.

Access Appliance supports a wide variety of storage arrays, direct attached storage as well as in-server SSDs and HDDs. During the initial configuration, you add the disks to the Access Appliance nodes. For a storage array, a disk is a LUN from the storage array. For best performance and resiliency, each LUN should be provisioned to all Access Appliance nodes. Local disks and fully shared disks have unique names, but partially shared disks across nodes may have the same name. Make sure that you do not assign LUNs from the same enclosure to different nodes partially.

Before you can provision storage to Access Appliance, the physical LUNs must be set up and zoned for use with the Access Appliance cluster. The storage array administrator normally allocates and zones the physical storage.

After the disks are correctly discovered by Access Appliance, you assign the disks to storage pools. You create a file system on one or more storage pools. You can mirror across different pools.

You can also use local disks that are shared over the network. Both DAS disks and SAN disks (LUNs) can be used by the same cluster, and you can have a mix of DAS and SAN disks in the same storage pool.