Four experts in four minutes: Creating LUNs

What is the purpose of creating LUNs, and in what situation would I create only one LUN and not several?

Questions about LUNs come up often in the Ask The Experts section of the site, so I presented this one to four experts with varied backgrounds to obtain some well-rounded information on this topic. Click on the links below to read their responses.

Christopher Poelker is a storage architect at Hitachi Data Systems. Prior to Hitachi, Chris was a lead storage architect/senior systems architect for Compaq Computer, Inc., in New York. While at Compaq, Chris built the sales/service engagement model for Compaq StorageWorks, and trained most of the company's VAR's, Channel's and Compaq ES/PS contacts on StorageWorks. Chris' certifications include: MCSE, MCT (Microsoft Trainer), MASE (Compaq Master ASE Storage Architect), and A+ certified (PC Technician).

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Greg Schulz is a senior analyst with the independent storage analysis firm, The Evaluator Group Inc. Greg has 25 years of IT experience as a consultant, end user, storage and storage networking vendor, and industry analyst. Greg has worked with Unix, Windows, IBM Mainframe, OpenVMS and other hardware/software environments. In addition to being an analyst, Greg is also the author and illustrator of "Resilient Storage Network

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Arun Taneja is the founder, president and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group, an analyst and consulting group focused on storage and storage-centric server technologies. From late 2000 to early 2003 he was a Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group, an analyst group focused on storage technologies. Mr. Taneja has 25 years' experience in the industry, specifically in the areas of servers, operating systems, file systems, Storage Area Networks (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS), FC, iSCSI and InfiniBand, clustering and storage management software (backup/restore, replication, snapshot, SRM, virtualization, etc.).

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Evan Marcus is a Senior Systems Engineer at Archivas Inc., and is the author of several articles and talks on the design of high availability systems. He is the author (along with Hal Stern of iPlanet) of Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems (2000, John Wiley & Sons). Evan has a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Lehigh University (1984) and an MBA from Rutgers University (1989).

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Checklist: How to troubleshoot your LUN

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