I have a Dell Equallogic NAS group, capacity 500 TB. Need to move off 100 TB out of it to another similar NAS group. Storage arrays are PS6500E (5 of them in one group) and NAS heads are FS7500. The second group has same setup and sits right next to the first group. What would be the fastest way to achieve this?
Need to copy 100 TB of data from Dell EQL NAS to another Dell NAS, what is the best and fastest method
copydell-equallogicnetwork-attached-storage
Related Solutions
First it is best to define the difference between a block device and filesystem. This is easier grasped if you are familiar with UNIX because it makes an objective distinction between the two things. Still the same applies to Windows.
- A block device is a handle to the raw disk.
- Such as
/dev/sdafor a disk or/dev/sda1for a partition on that disk.
- Such as
- A filesystem is layered on top of the block device in order to store data. You can then mount this.
- Such as
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/somepath.
- Such as
With those terms in mind it's then easier to see the distinction between the following.
- DAS is a block device from a disk which is physically [directly] attached to the host machine.
- You must place a filesystem upon it before it can be used.
- Technologies to do this include IDE, SCSI, SATA, etc.
- SAN is a block device which is delivered over the network.
- Like DAS you must still place a filesystem upon it before it can used.
- Technologies to do this include FibreChannel, iSCSI, FoE, etc.
- NAS is a filesystem delivered over the network.
- It is ready to mount and use.
- Technologies to do this include NFS, CIFS, AFS, etc.
From the above benchmarking, it looks like using dd on our target hardware with a blocksize of 64K gives us the best overall result considering the copy time and bloat:
dd if=srcFile of=dstFile iflag=direct oflag=direct bs=64K conv=sparse
Best Answer
With Equallogic, it's probably the fastest way to use the built in group move tool for a volume.
See here for details.