Tommie

Hi,

I believe that you can start with 8 Nodes….but not very sure ...will keep you posted once I get more information on the same.

Regards

Satish.N.Kutty

Hi,

Could you also let me know if you've replication enabled on the cluster, because if you've two clusters then they've to be expanded at the same capacity.

Regards

Satish.N.Kutty

I will stay tuned. Thanks

If you are doing a capacity add and not a migration, than you can add nodes in groups as shown below:

4 nodes for content protection mirroring (could get away with 2 however I believe they are sold in groups of 4 so you would add in groups of 4)

8 nodes for content protection parity

Since you have 2 cubes of 32 nodes, you will not have cabinet space and so an additional cabinet and root switches will be required as well as the cube add (nodes and cube switches)

You can check the protection scheme you are using via CLI command “show protection”

If you are doing a migration than you need enough nodes to ensure you have sufficient capacity for the migration as well as ensuring you have enough supported object count (100 million limit per node) as well as what is stated above dependant on protection scheme.

Dennis

Thanks Dennis, I'm running this cluster in Parity mode. This will be for expansion only not for migration. My goal is to get 50 to 60 TB of usable space. My vendor will be migrating data through their application that will then archive to the Centera. We don't use the Centera cabinets. We installed them in our standard Dell racks. Thats worked out well for us since they are already inplace with great capacity.

So will I still require the additional switches. If so that's not an issue. But if I can avoid that cost it would be even better.

Thanks

You will need 8 nodes, 2 cube switches and 2 root switches and all the cabling that joins them all together.

If these are 8TB nodes, that will give you an additional 64TB of raw capacity in addition to what you have available now. Note that this is raw capacity and does not equate to usable available capacity as Centera has reserves for regeneration and databases.

Dennis

No this is just an expansion. However in the future we will be adding an additional Centera to replicate this one. I'm aware that that one will need to be of the same capcity of this one at that time. But any help you can offer on my present delima would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again Dennis for your insight.

I spent sometime on the phone with my EMC rep and a couple of engineers and we hashed it out. My original assumption was correct. Now they understand what I needed and what should have been in the quote.

I appreciate your help. It gave me good ammo to fight with.

Thanks