Dell PowerVault ME5 Series Administrator's Guide

Pools

Virtual and linear storage systems both use pools. A pool is an aggregation of one or more disk groups that serves as a container for volumes.

A disk group is a group of disks of the same type, using a specific RAID level. For virtual pools, when volumes are added to the pool, the data is distributed across the disk groups in the pool. For linear pools, which have only one disk-group, the data is distributed linearly across the pool. If the owning controller fails, the partner controller assumes temporary ownership of the pool and resources owned by the failed controller. If a fault-tolerant cabling configuration, with appropriate mapping, is used to connect the controllers to hosts, LUNs for both controllers are accessible through the partner controller so I/O to volumes can continue without interruption.

In both virtual and linear storage, if the owning controller fails, the partner controller assumes temporary ownership of the pool and resources owned by the failed controller. If a fault-tolerant cabling configuration, with appropriate mapping, is used to connect the controllers to hosts, LUNs for both controllers are accessible through the partner controller so I/O to volumes can continue without interruption.

You can provision disks into disk groups. For information about how provisioning disks works, see Adding a disk group to a pool.