Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning 5.0 AdministratorÆs Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, May 2008

22 Understanding ISP
Administration roles in ISP
■ When I create a volume, ISP uses space on the same disks unless I choose
other disks from the storage pool manually. Why doesn’t ISP automatically
spread the volumes across the other disks in the storage pool to enhance I/O
performance?
ISP is tuned to use as few disks as possible. In any case, I/O performance
depends on many factors: the way storage is connected to the system, the
inherent capabilities of the storage, how volumes are configured and how
they share storage, the type of I/O requests made by applications, and the
amount of I/O from/to each volume. For example, allocating two volumes to
a single disk array that has a large cache would probably provide better
overall I/O performance than placing one volume on the disk array and the
other on a JBOD. If necessary, you can configure smaller storage pools in
separate disk groups to restrict the allocation of storage. Alternatively, you
can explicitly specify the storage that can or cannot be allocated to a
volume.
Administration roles in ISP
The administration of ISP can seem overwhelming when compared with the
traditional administration model in Veritas Volume Manager. To simplify
matters, it is useful to think in terms of three levels of administration based on
level of knowledge of ISP, and frequency of application of this knowledge:
■ Basic administration tasks
■ Advanced administration tasks
■ Expert administration tasks
Basic administration tasks are performed most often and require the least
knowledge of ISP to perform. Expert storage administration tasks are performed
least often and require the most knowledge of ISP to perform.
Basic administration tasks
Basic administration tasks include creating storage pools, and creating and
administering volumes. This includes performing tasks such as adding or
removing mirrors or columns from volumes, resizing volumes, and creating and
using volume snapshots.
The system administrator’s role requires the following knowledge of ISP:
■ Familiarity with the meaning of the terms disk group, storage pool,
template, user template, application volume, and capabilities such as
reliability, performance and fault tolerance.