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I have an msa1000 with an extra enclosure cascaded off it. When I installed the extra enclosure I bought one of the dual channel cards so I could split the extra enclosure into two channels. I have now however used up the 2nd enclosure far quicker than expected. I need to expand further and add an extra cascaded enclosure. However I am using both of the channels possible from the rear of the msa1000 enclosure. Is it possible to return the extra enclosure to be one channel rather than two and hence free up a port? I need to maintain data integrity however and cannot move the data of the spare enclosure.

Would it be possible to turn off the san, replace dual channel card in enclosure with single channel card and then turn san back on?

Hi Jez
Yes you can return this to a single enclosure by replacing the duplex I/O with a simplex one in the enclosure shelf.

This cannot of course be carried out with the storage system switched on otherwise you will confuse the MSA.

By doing this you are effectively moving half of the disks that were on a separate SCSI channel with ids of 0,1,2,3,4,5,8 to the same SCSI bus as the rest of the others but they now have ids of 9,10,11,12,13,14,5. All of this of course without removing the disks physically.

The MSA being a SMART controller will then pick up the new configuration and offer the data out. Brilliant isn't it.