This is about Merging pools in Equallogic
When Equallogic was introduced back in 2004 we had no pools to divide all the arrays in to. Back then all arrays was filled with SATA drives, and it was only with the introduction of the PS3000 series we got SAS drives. I do still believe most of the pressure was from the Exchange guys back then to get the SAS drives, when they had a terrifying demand for Raid-10 and SAS 15.000 rpm.
Then we needed to divide all the storage arrays into different pools, and separating the disk spindle types into each compartement. This worked well for a number of years, and customers were happy to upgrade to a max of 16 arrays in each SAN, which after the PS5500 surfaced could be extended to 768 diskdrives in each SAN. Today we can do 1.5 Petabyte, and in the near future with certification of the 3TB SATA drives, Equallogic reaches even higher to 2.1 Petabyte.
Then everything changed with the introduction of the 5.1 firmware with the new autotiering feature, doing a whole lot to both existing installations, but also when selling SAN’s to new customers. Now we place all arrays back into the same pool with a maximum of 8 arrays in each pool and still a total of 16 arrays. This placed customers in an awkward situation where they needed to buy additional arrays (or loan a demo from Dell), to be able to move the existing arrays into a single pool.
Only a few customers are aware of the Merging Pool feature which has been integrated into the Group manager (browser). With this feature you can migrate two pools into one, and then get all the benefits of the auto tiering feature, which by far is the most sexy thing Equallogic has introduced since 2004 (My believe).
So please do migrate all the arrays online into one pool, I will do an test next week to actually see this work in real life, a not only in the virtual Equallogic I’m running.