SCSI Solutions White Paper - HP-UX

6 Storage Management

Storage management refers to the management and configuration of storage devices,

enclosures, HBAs, and related components, including storage provisioning, backup planning,

and the timely detection and recovery from hardware failures or exception conditions. Online

management of storage hardware conditions, including drives, enclosures, and HBAs, is

provided on HP-UX via the Diagnostics Event Monitoring Service (EMS) tools. Centralized

storage management is also provided with certain storage products via the HP Command View

tools, as described in section 6.2 below.

6.1 EMS Tools

The EMS tool set is comprised of hardware monitors for different types and classes of devices.

These monitors provide automatic detection and notification of hardware events, and offer a

variety of notification methods to alert you when a problem occurs. They are integrated into

MC/ServiceGuard and other applications, allowing the application to take timely action when

hardware problems occur. Among the available SCSI monitors are disk and tape class

monitors for the management of disk and tape drives, and enclosure monitors for managing and

monitoring the resources within various types of enclosures.

If a problem is detected with a supported hardware module, the monitor immediately sends an

event to the Event Monitoring Service (EMS) which alerts the customer using the notification

method specified for that instance of the monitor. EMS notification messages identify the

problem, what caused it, and what must be done to correct it. In addition to hardware failures,

some monitors can provide predictive notifications, alerting the customer to a potential problem

and the opportunity to replace a component before it fails.

Brief descriptions of some of the key pSCSI-related hardware monitors are given below. The

name in parentheses is the computer-friendly name for the monitor. For more details on the

various EMS tools and supported products go to http://docs.hp.com/en/diag.html.

6.1.1 Disk Monitor

The Disk Monitor (disk_em) monitors the operation of disk drives, whether standalone or within

an enclosure. It is the default event monitor for SCSI disk resources. It only operates on HP-

supported non-removable-media disks. Predictive events monitored include the detection of an

“excessive rate of recovered media defects”, which indicates that while these errors have all

been recovered from with no data loss, the drive may fail due to an unrecoverable error in the

near future and should be replaced.

6.1.1.1 diskinfo(1M) command

While the diskinfo command is not an EMS tool, it is a standard command on HP-UX which can

be used to obtain information about a disk device. It takes as an argument a character-mode

device file for a disk (for example, /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0) and displays information such as the

vendor name, product id, disk capacity, block size, and revision number of the disk. See the

associated HP-UX man page for additional details.