A user storage pool contains the blocks of data that make up user files. SAN File System stores the data that describes the files, called file metadata, separately from the actual file data. You can create one or more user storage pools, and then create policies that contain rules that cause metadata servers to store data for specific files in the appropriate storage pools.
The default storage pool is a special user storage pool. This optional storage pool is used to store the data for a file if the file is not assigned to a specific storage pool by a rule in the active policy. A default storage pool is created when SAN File System is installed. However, if you want to use the default storage pool, you must assign one or more volumes to it. There can be only one default user storage pool in SAN File System. You can designate any user storage pool that has volumes assigned to it to be the default storage pool. You can choose to disable the default storage pool. In this case, newly created files that do not match any rules in the active policy are not saved.
Parent topic: Storage pools