Q: Can I mix spindle speeds in the pool, I know it was a no-no before but was unsure with the new "Fluid Data Technology". It is possible to mix drive technologies in the same pool, however, if you do put them in the same pool, the performance balancing will tend to move hot pages to the less busy array.  There is a latency difference threshold that will determine when that happens.  However, the new 6010 is larger by a fair amount compared to the existing 6010’s, so a larger proportion of the volume slices will reside on this member, so it will end up doing most of the work. The other thing to consider is the iSCSI connections, more pools equals more connections, but this may not be issue if you are well below the max amount now (1024 per pool, 4096 up to 4 pools) Overall, you are likely better off in a different pool and if something changes you can later merge them together. If you haven’t seen this, review the “Dell EqualLogic PS Series Architecture: Load Balancer” which discusses this in greater detail: www.equallogic.com/.../DownloadAsset.aspx Q: Turnaround time for APLB to balance when in starts seeing the latency? APLB runs with a lower priority than the processing of application I/O.  Every few minutes the APLB analyzes the latencies of the members in the pool and if any members have a higher latency then the lowest latency member(s), APLB will rebalance by moving high I/O to a less loaded member (with lower latency).   This starts as soon as I/O begins and certain patterns of data access develop. -joe
Hey all, We currently have a group with 3 PS6010's with 600GB 15k SAS drives in RAID 50 connected via 10GE.  We just purchased a new PS6010 with 3TB 7.2k SAS drives.  All members are on the latest firmware 5.2.2. So we have been trying to decide if we wanted to add this new member to the same pool to take advantage of the APLB or Create a new pool for it. So my question is twofold, can I mix spindle speeds in the pool, I know it was a no-no before but was unsure with the new "Fluid Data Technology". If I can mix and bring this into the pool what is the turnaround time for APLB to balance when in starts seeing the latency?  We are a College who sees large activity bursts at the registration periods before semesters and this only lasts a few days, so we were unsure if the APLB would react fast enough to this burst periods? Any info would be appreciated.
New Member to Group