2.5. Fibre Channel Storage Devices

Table 2.3, “Fibre Channel Storage Device Requirements” shows requirements for Fibre Channel devices that are to be connected to a GFS cluster.

Table 2.3. Fibre Channel Storage Device Requirements

Requirement Description
Device Type
FC RAID array or JBOD
Note: Make sure that the devices can operate reliably when heavily accessed simultaneously from multiple initiators.
Note: Make sure that your GFS configuration does not exceed the number of nodes an array or JBOD supports.
Size
GFS is based on a 64-bit architecture, which can theoretically accommodate an 8 EB file system. However, the current supported maximum size of a GFS file system is 25 TB. If your system requires GFS file systems larger than 25 TB, contact your Red Hat service representative.
When determining the size of your file system, you should consider your recovery needs. Running the fsck command on the file system can take a long time and consume a large amount of memory. Additionally, in the event of a disk or disk-subsytem failure, recovery time is limited by the speed of your backup media.