Per the documentation, p 393, you can only expand volumes, not pools:
8.4.8 Expanding a volume
The IBM Storwize V3700 can expand volumes. This feature should be used
only if the host OS supports it. This capability increases the
capacity that is allocate d to the particular volume by the amount
specified. To expand a volume, complete the following steps:
...
However, you can migrate your volumes to a new pool that is larger, and then expand your volume:
8.4.9 Migrating a volume to another Storage Pool
The IBM Storwize V3700 supports online volume migration while
applications are running. Using volume migration, volumes can be
moved between Storage Pools. ...
Assuming you currently have 3-disk RAID5 pools for your hosts, you can:
- Create a new pool using 5 disks in a RAID5 configuration.
- Migrate the existing volume(s) for one server to the new pool.
- Expand the volume(s) that are now on the new pool.
- Take the disks freed up and repeat for each server.
Also, 8 drives is getting a bit large for RAID5. You'll almost certainly get better performance striping your volume(s) across two 5-drive RAID5 arrays, especially if you match the RAID5 stripe size to the file system block size and align your disk partition(s) to line up with RAID stripe boundaries. You won't have quite as much available storage as you'll have more parity drives, but then that will improve your availability.
By using a power-of-two number of data disks in a RAID5 or RAID6 array, you can much more easily match the RAID stripe size and alignment to the "natural" IO size used to read/write data. For example, if the filesystem block size happens to be 128KB, you can set up a 5-disk RAID5 array to have a RAID stripe size of 128KB. You can't do that with an 8-disk RAID5 array, for example.
A write to a RAID5 or RAID6 array that doesn't completely overwrite an entire stripe results in a "read-modify-write" operation, best explained here (http://www.infostor.com/index/articles/display/107505/articles/infostor/volume-5/issue-7/features/special-report/raid-revisited-a-technical-look-at-raid-5.html):
Read-modify-write
Consider a stripe composed of four strips of data and one strip of
parity. Suppose the host wants to change just a small amount of data
that takes up the space on only one strip within the stripe. The RAID
controller cannot simply write that small portion of data and consider
the request complete. It must also update the parity data. Remember
that the parity data is calculated by performing XOR operations on
every strip within the stripe. So, when one or more strips change,
parity needs to be recalculated.
...
So, take a filesystem configured to use 8KB blocks. Now, what happens when that 8KB block is written to a 10-drive RAID5 array? Oh, and the array was built with a 1MB block size per disk because "bigger is better and faster". But no, it isn't. That means the stripe size across the RAID5 array is a full nine megabytes. So to write that 8KB in the middle of the stripe, the RAID controller needs to read 9 MB of data, modify it with the new 8KB of data, recompute the parity of the stripe, and then write the new data and parity - at the least. The controller may need to write the entire 9MB. There are a lot of optimizations that can be done - and good RAID controllers do them well - but logically that's what has to happen. And lower-end RAID controllers don't do them at all. So that 8KB write might very well turn into a 9MB read followed by a 9MB write.
I have no idea how good the RAID controllers are in an IBM V3700.
Now, take a 5-drive RAID5 array and a file system with a 64KB block size. The array was built with a 16KB per-disk block size, so with 4 data disks the stripe size is 64KB. Now, if the disk partitions are properly aligned, writing a 64KB block matches the array stripe. The controller computes the parity bits for the data and then just writes it to the disks, overwriting the data that was there.
Guess which one is faster.
Best Answer
Since you're using hardware RAID, disabling this service should be fine since this service offers RAID at the OS level (which you probably aren't using). If this were a virtual machine you wouldn't need this service since the VMHost should be running some sort of RAID.
FWIW, Microsoft maintains a page titled Guidance on disabling system services on Windows Server 2016 with Desktop Experience. Below is the entry for smphost.