Administrator's Guide

Figure 7 Storage management process example
Physical storage elements
The lowest level of storage management occurs at the physical drive level. Minimally, choosing
the best disk carving strategy includes the following policies:
• Analyze current corporate and departmental structure.
• Analyze the current file server structure and environment.
• Plan properly to ensure the best configuration and use of storage.
Determine the desired priority of fault tolerance, performance, and storage capacity.◦
◦ Use the determined priority of system characteristics to determine the optimal striping
policy and RAID level.
• Include the appropriate number of physical drives in the arrays to create logical storage
elements of desired sizes.
26 Storage management overview