Growing an Array?

I know exactly what I would like to do, but I'm not RAID-Smart enough to know if this is an existing capability or completely impossible.

Speaking in very generic terms, I have a RAID 5 array that is reaching it's capacity.  Drives are cheap and I want to grow the array.  Backing up the array to DLT is "hard" and I don't want to take my production system offline.   I want to buy a stack of new (hot swappable) drives and do the following to my array:

1)  pop out drive 1
2)  Insert new drive
3)  "initialize" the new drive
4)  Some magic happens and the larger drive becomes part of the array

lather, rinse, repeat for the remaining replacement drives and *poof* I have a larger array.

This capability would save me an incredible amount of labor and hand wringing.  Our "technology refresh" upgrades happen quite regularly because our data never stops growing.   Is this a pipe dream or an eventual reality?

TIA

Regards,

Gary Huntress
Code 4113
Naval Undersea Warfare Center
Newport, RI  02841
1-800-669-6892 x28990

On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Huntress Gary B NPRI wrote:

1)  pop out drive 1
2)  Insert new drive
3)  "initialize" the new drive
4)  Some magic happens and the larger drive becomes part of the array

lather, rinse, repeat for the remaining replacement drives and *poof* I have a larger array.

In theory you could do this now...

This capability would save me an incredible amount of labor and hand wringing.  Our "technology refresh" upgrades happen quite regularly because our data never stops growing.   Is this a pipe dream or an eventual reality?

How much data are you talking about? It took me 16 hours to resize to a
10x73GB array. If you were to do that in stages then it could end up
taking days or weeks in which case backing up to DLT might become more
attractive.

Note that the raid array will be offline while the resize takes place.

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