SAN Volume Controller operating environment
To use the system, you must meet the minimum hardware and software requirements and ensure that other operating environment criteria are met.
Minimum requirements
SAN Volume Controller 2145-DH8 and SAN Volume Controller 2145-SV1 node features
- A 19-inch rack-mounted enclosure
- At least one Fibre Channel adapter or one 10 Gbps Ethernet adapter
- Optional second and third Fibre Channel adapters
- 32 GB memory per processor
- One or two, eight-core processors
Dual redundant power supplies
Up to two SAN Volume Controller expansion enclosures to house optional flash drives
- iSCSI host attachment (1 Gbps Ethernet and optional 10 Gbps Ethernet)
Supports optional IBM® Real-time Compression™
SAN Volume Controller 2145-CG8 node features
SAN Volume Controller 2145-CF8 node features
RAID MDisk features
You can use the SAN Volume Controller management GUI or the command-line interface (CLI) to create a RAID MDisk from the local drives. RAID (other than RAID 0) offers redundancy and the ability to recover from the physical failure of a drive.
A RAID MDisk can be composed of flash drives or hard disk drives (HDDs).
Creating a storage pool that contains both flash drive MDisks and HDD MDisks enables the automatic data-placement mode of the IBM Easy Tier® function. By using this mode, volumes can take advantage of the better performance of the higher speed flash drives.
Supported RAID levels are RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 10.
Distributed array features
These arrays, which can contain 4 - 128 drives, also contain rebuild areas that are used to maintain redundancy after a drive fails.
Supported RAID levels are Distributed RAID 5 and Distributed RAID 6
To enhance performance of a distributed array, all of the drives must come from the same, or superior, drive class. Each drive class is identified by its drive_class_id.
Flash drive features
Support for flash drives is an optional feature of the SAN Volume Controller 2145-CG8 and SAN Volume Controller 2145-CF8.
- Up to four flash drives can be installed on each SAN Volume Controller 2145-CG8 and SAN Volume Controller 2145-CF8 node. An IBM PCIe SAS host bus adapter (HBA) is required on each node that contains a flash drive.
- Each flash drive is a 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive.
- Each flash drive provides up to 146 GB of real capacity.
- Flash drives are hot-pluggable and hot-swappable.
Supported hosts
In a storage area network (SAN) environment, host systems are application servers that access data from the storage controllers that are connected to the SAN. Hosts that are running in a number of operating environments can connect to the storage by using the SAN Volume Controller. Host connections to the SAN Volume Controller are either SCSI over the Fibre Channel SAN, Fibre Channel over Ethernet SAN, or iSCSI over an Ethernet network.
For a list of the supported host operating systems, see http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/support/storage/ssic/interoperability.wss
Multipathing software
For more information, see http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/support/storage/ssic/interoperability.wss
User interfaces
The SAN Volume Controller system provides these user interfaces:
- The management GUI, a web-accessible graphical user interface (GUI) that supports flexible and rapid access to storage management information
- A command-line interface (CLI) that uses Secure Shell (SSH)
- Service assistant, a web application that helps troubleshoot and resolve problems on a node
Application programming interfaces
The SAN Volume Controller system provides an application programming interface that is called the Common Information Model (CIM) agent. The CIM agent supports the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) of the Storage Network Industry Association.