IBM DS3500 - Virtualization; IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller Overview

Chapter 3. IBM System Storage DS3500 Storage System planning tasks 79
Draft Document for Review March 28, 2011 12:24 pm 7914DS3KPlanning_090710.fm
– Mirrored and RAID 5 options are software implementations that have an additional
impact on top of the existing underlying fault tolerance level configured on the DS3500
Storage System. They can be employed to spread the workload between multiple
disks, but then there are two lots of redundancy happening at two separate levels.
These possibilities must be tested in your environment to ensure that the solution chosen
suits your needs and requirements.
3.5.3 Virtualization
With the growth and popularity of storage area networks, storage environments are getting
more and more complex. Storage virtualization reduces the complexity and costs of
managing storage environments and optimizes storage utilization in a heterogeneous
environment.
The IBM Storage Area Network Volume Controller (SVC) and IBM TotalStorage® Productivity
Center products addresses certain needs.
3.5.4 IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller overview
The IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller is a scalable hardware and software
solution to allow aggregation of storage from various disk subsystems. It provides storage
virtualization and a consistent view of storage across a Storage Area Network (SAN).
The SAN Volume Controller provides in-band storage virtualization by creating a pool of
managed disks from attached back-end disk storage systems. These managed disks are then
mapped to a set of virtual disks for use by various host systems.
In conjunction with the DS3500 Storage System family, the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) can
increase the storage copy services functionality and also the flexibility of SAN-based storage.
The SVC is very flexible in its use. It can manage all host storage requirements or just part of
them. A DS3500 Storage System can still be used to allocate storage to hosts or use the
SVC, which is dependent upon various needs and requirements.
The SVC also offers an alternative to FlashCopy, VolumeCopy, and Enhanced Remote
Mirroring for disaster recovery, high availability, and maintenance. If the use of SVC with a
DS3500 Storage System is planned, then these premium features will not be required.
The SVC can also reduce the requirement for additional partitions. The SVC only consumes
one storage partition. If you plan to use the SVC for all of your hosts, then a storage partition
upgrade might not be required.
SVC is licensed by the capacity that is being managed. This capacity also includes the
capacity used by the copy services.
For detailed information about SVC implementation, see Implementing the IBM System
Storage SAN Volume Controller V4.3, SG24-6423.
For more information about Storage Virtualization, see the IBM TotalStorage Virtualization
Web site at:
http://www.ibm.com/servers/storage/software/virtualization/index.html
For more information about SAN Volume Controller, see its home page at:
http://www.ibm.com/servers/storage/software/virtualization/svc/index.html