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

You must set up your operating environment accordingly:

Minimum of one pair of system nodes

SAN Volume Controller 2145-DH8 and SAN Volume Controller 2145-SV1 node features

The SAN Volume Controller 2145-DH8 and SAN Volume Controller 2145-SV1 nodes contain the following features:

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
Expansion enclosures to house optional flash drives
iSCSI host and storage controller attachment (1 Gbps or 10 Gbps electrical Ethernet and optional 10 Gbps or 25 Gbps optical Ethernet)
Supports optional IBM® Real-time Compression™

RAID MDisk features

You can use the 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.

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 system . Host connections to the system 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 the following website:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/support/storage/ssic/interoperability.wss

Multipathing software

For information about multipathing software, see http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/support/storage/ssic/interoperability.wss

User interfaces

The 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 canister.

Application programming interfaces

The 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.