Striping or Slicing

Normally, LUNs are created by striping or mirroring the entire contents of a physical drive module, which means that as you fill up your drives, the bandwidth decreases. This is because the area toward the inner part of the drive is slower in reads and writes than the outer portion of the drive. Slicing allows you to create arrays with similar speed characteristics. You can divide a LUN into as many as six slices. Each slice pairs the portions of the drive with the same portions on its other paired drives. Xsan will recognize these slices as individual LUNs, starting from the first slice (the outer, or fastest, part of the drive) to the last (the inner, or slowest part).