This is a cross post from the EMC list server:

A bit of back ground and a summary of our problem. We have a 3700 frame that
is about 60% full of 23GB drives. The drives are split into 4.6GB logical
partitions. We assigned drives to the controllers based on HP's
recommendation of no more than 8-10 drives for performance since we have
some very i/o intensive applications.
My problem is that all 32 controllers all "full", e.g. have 8-10 drives
assigned, but the emc box is only half full of drives. What I am interested
in is how many drives you have assigned to each controller?
HP's theory on the 8-10 drives deals with an optimal number of spindles, if
I'm not mistaken. Since a logical emc drive does not necessarily equate to a
spindle we are thinking about stringing the drives out 15-20 per controller
so that we can fill the frame with drives. In our theory we would just need
to ensure that we did not exceed the capacity of the f/w scsi channel during
peak processing. I think that this can be done by arranging the drives so
that we have a good mix of low use drives and high use drives on each
controller.
Any thoughts or comments? Feel free to poke holes in this!
Carl McNamee
Systems Administrator
Billing Concepts