Chapter 3. Planning 45
– Shared storage (volumes presented to more than one host) that is required in your 
environment.
/SM590000Define the amount of internal storage that you plan to provision from internal arrays. 
Consider the following information:
– Amount of storage in each drive tier that you plan to deploy.
– The number of drives that you must provision the required storage. Consider RAID 
levels, number of drives per array, and hot spares for each tier. Define the number of 
drives and their form factor.
– The number of expansion enclosures you must hold the drives required to provision the 
required storage.
/SM590000Per host: 
– Volume capacity.
– Logical unit number (LUN) quantity.
– Volume sizes.
/SM590000Decide whether you must plan for more than one site. For multi-site deployment, review 
the extra configuration requirements that are imposed.
/SM590000Define the number of clusters and the number of enclosures (1 - 4) for each cluster. The 
number of necessary I/O Groups depends on the overall performance requirements and 
the number of hosts you plan to attach.
/SM590000Decide whether you are going to use N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). If you plan to use 
NPIV, review the extra configuration requirements that are imposed.
/SM590000Design the SAN according to the requirement for high availability (HA) and best 
performance. Consider the total number of ports and the bandwidth that is needed at each 
link, especially Inter-Switch Links (ISLs). Consider ISL trunking for improved performance. 
Separately collect requirements for Fibre Channel and IP-based storage network.
/SM590000Define a naming convention for the Storwize V7000 clusters, nodes, hosts, and storage 
objects.
/SM590000Define the Storwize V7000 service Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and the system’s 
management IP addresses.
Note: Use DRAID 6 as the default RAID level for your arrays.
Note: When planning the capacities, note if the numbers state the net storage capacity 
(that is, available to be used by applications running on any host), or gross capacity, 
which includes overhead for spare drives (both because of RAID redundancy and 
planned hot spare drives) and for file system metadata. 
For file system metadata, include overhead incurred by all layers of storage 
virtualization. In particular, if you plan storage for virtual machines whose drives are 
actualized as files on a parallel file system, include metadata overhead for the storage 
virtualization technology that is used by your hypervisor software.
Note: Check and carefully count the required ports. Separately note the ports that are 
dedicated for extended links. You might need more long-wave gigabit interface 
converters (GBICs), especially in an enhanced stretched cluster (ESC) or HyperSwap 
environment.