WAAS Apliance usable storage -vs- maximum data storage

[bberry]

We are looking into deploying the new Wave 594 and have a question about the drive space. The unit comes with a 500G drive and a second optional 500G drive. In one place on the specs they say optional second hard disk drive for RAID 1 redundancy but under the hardware specs they list maximum data storage as 2 x 500G HDD. Do I have the potential for a total of 1T of space or just 500G Raid1? Also is the space divided up dynamically or are there hard limits? I figure some of this space needs to be allocated to the DRE cache and the rest for other data storage such as prepositioning. I am trying to find out what my maximums would be.

Brent                   

[finn.poulsen]

Hi Brent,

Don't bother.

You cannot change the allocations between the different allocations.

WAAS installation (WAAS rescue disk or preinstalled) will determine the allocation based on :

1. The device model
2. The amount of RAM installed (within the supported specs)

The reason for putting in an additional disk, in a 594, is solely for RAID-1 purposes, you will always end of with 500GB disk space.

You have to ask your Cisco accoung manager for the precise sizing guides, but for a :

• 594 w/8GB RAM (default) - you'll end up with 80GB of DRE disk cache and 100GB for the CIFS object cache
• 594 w/12GB RAM - you'll end up with 120GB of DRE disk cache and 100GB for the CIFS object cache

and these cannot be modied.

Best regards

Finn

[bberry]

Finn,

So I guess my options are that if I need more than 100G for prepositioning I have to move up to a larger appliance? These locations do a lot with autocadd files and I am just trying to make sure I understand all their options since they share these files over the WAN and their biggest complaint is how long it takes to open a file across the WAN today.

Brent

[finn.poulsen]

Hi Brent,

Prepositioning uses the CIFS object cache (and of course the DRE as well), but basically in order to preposition 100GB of data you'll need at least 100GB object cache (and this more or less requires that no-one else is retreiving any other document using CIFS) otherwise something has to be aged out.

The WAVE-694 also "only" have 100Gb of CIFS object cache, no matter how much RAM is inserted.

In order to have a platform capable of holding more than 100GB of CIFS object cache, you'll basically need some of the huge datacenter platforms (7541, 7571, 8541).

And my immidiate guess is that these don't fit in there ... neither spacewise not financially ;-)

Also bare in mind the prepositioning only works when using the CIFS Application optimizer, not the SMB AO.

/Finn