Deployment Planning and Site Preparation
What this domain covers
Site preparation questions test whether you can take a sizing estimate and turn it into a rack position, a power budget, a firewall change list and an IP plan before the appliance arrives - and whether you know which omissions cause a failed install day.
Rack, power and environment
- Use a four-post rack with the model-specific rail kit; a loaded controller or shelf can exceed 40 kg, so plan a lift or two-person install.
- Connect the two PSUs to separate PDUs on separate circuits. Redundancy only exists if the two feeds are independent.
- Convert draw to heat: BTU/hr = watts x 3.412. Two shelves pulling about 1,000 W each add roughly 6,800 BTU/hr to the row, which must already be in the cooling budget.
- Airflow is front-to-back. Do not reverse it, block the bezel, or leave no clearance for the hot aisle.
- Typical inlet envelope for DD systems is about 10-35 C with 20-80% non-condensing humidity, with derating at altitude.
- Size UPS runtime for an orderly shutdown, not for continuing backups.
Network and service planning
- Separate management (1 GbE, System Manager, SSH, Autosupport) from data (10/25 GbE, backup and replication) subnets.
- Reserve DNS A and PTR records, NTP sources, an SMTP relay, syslog and SNMP trap receivers before install; CIFS joins and retention lock fail without correct time and name resolution.
- Open 443 and 22 for management, 2049 and 111 for NFS, 445 for SMB, 161/162 for SNMP, 123 for NTP, and the DD Boost port 2051 between clients and appliance - and between source and destination appliances for replication.
- For Cloud Tier and CloudIQ, allow outbound 443, usually through a proxy.
- Collect the license keys and the replication partner addresses in advance.
Worked example
A customer produces 300 TB logical per week with an expected 18:1 reduction and 20% year-one growth. Physical = 300 / 18 = 16.7 TB; with 20% growth that is 20 TB; keep roughly 10% free space, so plan about 22 TB usable and order capacity licences at the next available step above that. For replication, if 2 TB changes daily and the window is 8 hours, that is 250 GB/hr = 250 x 8 / 3600 = about 0.56 Gbps, so a dedicated 1 GbE link is the minimum and a shared 10 GbE is comfortable.
Traps that cost marks
- Ordering hardware without matching capacity licences, which blocks the file system build.
- Missing PTR records so the CIFS/AD join fails on install day.
- A firewall that permits ICMP but blocks TCP 2051, so DD Boost silently fails while pings succeed.
- Assuming a 10 GbE SFP+ port can negotiate down to 1 GbE copper - it cannot without the right optic or DAC.