The T3+ array now supports the 181GB disk drives. If a RAID5 volume is made with all available disks, the resulting volume size is much larger than 1TB (terabyte). However, after creating such a large volume, Solaris does not see the volume.

If one creates two smaller RAID5 volumes on the T3+ (each under 1TB), they can be seen by Solaris, but in doing so, an extra disk would be lost due to parity for the second volume.

Is this some limit? Can anything be done to get Solaris to recognize the larger-than-1TB volume?

The maximum size of a volume on a T3+ is larger than 1TB. There is no problem creating such a large volume on the T3+. The limitation one runs into, however, lies with Solaris. Solaris versions 9 and less can only recognize devices, such as T3+ volumes, up to 1TB (this may change in Solaris 10).

However, there is something you can do. The T3+ has a feature called volume slicing, which allows you to create a large volume and then 'slice' it up into smaller pieces. Each of these "pieces" is then seen by Solaris as a seperate device.

For example, if you take all 9 of the 180GB disks and create a RAID5 volume with them, you will have a (approximately) 1400GB volume. Then, using the volume slicing feature, you can carve that volume into 2 seperate "slices" of approximately 700GB each. Solaris will then be able to see see both 700GB devices.

See the T3+ Administrators Guide to get familiar with the volume slicing feature.

And another thing.....

If you really need to have a larger-than-1TB filesystem on the Solaris system, you could optionally follow these steps, but you would have to have Veritas Volume Manager and VxFS.

Once you get Solaris to see the two 700GB devices, you can [optionally] use Veritas Volume Manager (version 3.5 or higher) to concatinate them together, thus making a 1400GB Veritas volume. At that point, you can use Veritas FileSystem (VxFS version 3.5 or higher) to create the filesystem on it. Unfortunately, UFS has a limitation of 1TB on Solaris 9 and lower, so you would not be able to use it.