(repost from the EQ forum, where I put this the first time, by mistake)
We're extending the storage for a PE 730xd backup server with 24 internal drives by adding an FC-attached MD3860f aray, with 60x 8TB drives.
We've kicked around 10, 12, and 15-disk RAID LUNs (RAID5 or RAID-dual-parity). 5x 12-disk RAID-DP LUNS is our most likely layout. We've tested a RAID-DP disk rebuild, and it took 40 hours, so RAID5 probably isn't going to work.
From multiple LUNS, we want one big drive in Windows. We could do this with a logical drive spanning 5 LUNS/volumes, but Dell PowerVault support folks cautioned us not to do this.
We could look at Windows Storage Spaces, but that doesn't work for FC (or iSCSI) drives.
We could use Dell Dynamic Disk Pools (recommended by Dell support) but these max out at 64 TB per virtual disk, so we would still have to link/stripe/extend these drives together in Windows.
So... how do people do this with MD3 arrays?
Is there another layer of striping, or logical drive creation across LUNs, in the MD3 that we're missing?