Deployment Choices: Volume Groups vs. Dynamic Disk Pools (E-Series)¶

There are two options for defining storage pools on an E-Series storage array; each have different performance characteristics and features.

Volume Groups

• Disk count will vary depending on the RAID Level selected.
• Expand/extend options are expensive and cannot be performed concurrently or while a volume on the pool is initializing.
• Higher raw performance compared to DDP.
• Adding new disks will require an expensive reconstruction operation.

Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP)

• DDP’s require a minimum of 11 disks.
• RAID reconstruction speed upon drive failures is greatly increased over Volume Groups.
• Thin provisioned volumes are supported.
• Volume expand/extend operations can run concurrently and while volumes are initializing.
• Additional disks can be added with no additional reconstruction overhead.