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Planning: MD3600i Series Storage Array Terms and Concepts 37
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Planning: MD3600i Series Storage
Array Terms and Concepts
This chapter describes the storage array concepts, which help in configuring
and operating the Dell PowerVault MD3600i Series storage arrays.
Physical Disks, Virtual Disks, and Disk Groups
Physical disks in your storage array provide the physical storage capacity for
your data. Before you can begin writing data to the storage array, you must
configure the physical storage capacity into logical components, called disk
groups and virtual disks.
A disk group is a set of physical disks upon which multiple virtual disks are
created. The maximum number of physical disks supported in a disk group is
96 drives for RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID10, and 30 drives for RAID 5 and
RAID 6. You can create disk groups from unconfigured capacity on your
storage array.
A virtual disk is a partition in a disk group that is made up of contiguous data
segments of the physical disks in the disk group. A virtual disk consists of data
segments from all physical disks in the disk group.
All virtual disks in a disk group support the same RAID level. The storage
array supports up to 255 virtual disks (minimum size of 10 MB each) that can
be assigned to host servers. Each virtual disk is assigned a Logical Unit
Number (LUN) that is recognized by the host operating system.
Virtual disks and disk groups are set up according to how you plan to organize
your data. For example, you might have one virtual disk for inventory, a
second virtual disk for financial and tax information, and so on.
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