Product Brief: The Next Generation Mass Storage Stack

HP-UX 11i v3 – Next Generation Mass Storage Stack
Meeting future storage challenges
Server storage is growing in capability, size and complexity.
Your systems need to connect to a wide range of storage
devices, with ever increasing capacities, greater functionality
and over a range of interface and transport protocols.
The HP-UX 11i v3 mass storage stack is architected to meet
these challenges by simplifying ease of use and storage
management, increasing system performance and providing
immense scalability.
Ease of use
HP-UX 11i v3 can automatically detect and configure your
storage devices, Logical Units (LUNs) and the paths across the
storage fabric to each LUN. Changes and additions to devices,
LUN capacities and SAN fabrics are quickly detected and
automatically configured.
Current HP-UX users will find 11i v3 very familiar, with
backwards compatibility and easy to use adoption tools for the
advanced features such as multi-path I/O and load balancing.
No re-configuration is required when upgrading to 11i v3 and
no re-training is required for your IT staff.
Scalability
Designed with greater levels of parallel processing HP-UX 11i
v3 is architected to address up to 16 Million LUNs each of
which can be up to 8 Zettabytes (8 Billion Terabytes) in size.
With immense scalability HP-UX 11i v3 meets all of your
current and future storage capacity needs.
Performance
Significant performance gains are achieved with HP-UX 11i v3
by using high levels of concurrent I/O operations and parallel
processing along with processor allegiance algorithms and
usage of unique HP server hardware features such as Cell
Local Memory.
Mulit-pathing and load balancing are built in and fully
integrated into HP-UX 11i v3 and provide the best
performance across a wide variety of storage configurations
without the complexity of configuring PVLinks or add-on multi-
pathing utilities. A choice of load balancing algorithms is
provided when fine performance tuning is desired.
The net result is more performance for your applications.
Manageability
Not only is HP-UX 11i v3 faster it’s also much easier to use.
New devices and LUNs are automatically discovered,
configured and even tuned for the best performance. At the
same time the I/O paths to each LUN are automatically
configured for multi-pathing and load balancing. Each LUN is
given a single virtual name that provides a persistent way to
address the LUN regardless of changes in the storage
infrastructure.
Changes to the storage fabric from either link addition or
failure are automatically detected and multi-pathing and load
balancing are reconfigured to ensure the best performance
and availabilities levels are maintained.
Advanced command line tools like 'scsimgr' and integration
with systems and storage management utilities such as
Systems Management Homepage (SMH), Systems Insight
Manager (SIM) and Storage Essentials provide powerful
management and diagnostics for the SAN and mass storage
devices.
Resiliency
The built in multi-pathing and virtual LUN names provide
automated resilience to link failures. Applications simply
continue to access the device without the need for
reconfiguration. The paths to boot and dump devices are also
protected and seamlessly re-configured in the event of a path
failure.
Through advanced monitoring abilities HP-UX 11i v3 can
quickly act upon asynchronous SAN events such as link or
device failure, recovery or addition. In the event of a link
failure, I/Os are simply routed to the working links of the
multi-path configuration, the I/O load is rebalanced across
available links and an event notification is made so a repair of
the failed link can be scheduled.
When previously failed links are recovered they are
automatically added and used for multi-pathing and load
balancing.
Full integration with HP’s Serviceguard provides best in class
I/O path resiliency.
Management Performance Scalability
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