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We've recently purchased 2 x Dell R710s and 2 x Dell MD3400 SAS storage devices with 12 2tb drives in each with 2 dual SAS connections from each server to 2 dual raid controllers on both MD3400s (I've attached a diagram to show the connection config).

SAS Connection Diagram

It's my first foray into DAS and I'm trying to set it all up using guides and am struggling to accomplish what I'd like to do.

What I'm after is creating a virtual disk that contains all the disks on both the MD3400s (raid 5, creating a ~40tb drive), however I'm not sure if I'm able to pool the disks on the separate MD3400s to create this. I only seem to be able to find a way to create 2 individual virtual drives of ~20TB each on each individual MD3400.

Is what I'm trying to do possible? Or would we need to interconnect the MD3400s directly with SAS cables?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rossaluss
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  • The md serie is the low end for dell, you cant span a volume over them. You fall in the san/ps serie to have such feature – yagmoth555 Aug 10 '15 at 10:53
  • You could look at storage spaces but I'm not 100% sure the md3400s can do it. Strangely the md1200s can do as essential part is not having RAID card in the storage device. The next version of server has something called storage spaces direct which expands on storage spaces but I believe you would still need at least a different controller in the storage units – Drifter104 Aug 10 '15 at 11:05

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You need to chain the shelves together in order to span a disk between them. (Well at least you could with the 3000 and 3200 series I think.

Windows storage spaces might help you get there. Rather than having two controller shelves, it is more common to have a single controller shelf such as the MD3400 and extra shelves attached to it via SAS. That ways its all one logical entity to connected hosts.

tomstephens89
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