Sun Fire V445 Server Administration Guide - SCN Research

Sun’s volume management products also provide RAID data redundancy and
performance features. RAID is a technology that helps protect against disk and
hardware failures. Through RAID technology, volume management software is able
to provide high data availability, excellent I/O performance, and simplified
administration.
About Volume Management Software
Volume management software lets you create disk volumes. Sun Microsystems offers
two different volume management applications for use on the Sun Fire V445 server:
■ Solaris Volume Manager software
■ VERITAS Volume Manager software
Sun’s volume management applications offer the following features:
■ Support for several types of RAID configurations, which provide varying degrees
of availability, capacity, and performance
■ Hot-spare facilities, which provide for automatic data recovery when disks fail
■ Performance analysis tools, which enable you to monitor I/O performance and
isolate bottlenecks
■ A graphical user interface (GUI), which simplifies storage management
■ Support for online resizing, which enables volumes and their file systems to grow
and shrink online
■ Online reconfiguration facilities, which let you change to a different RAID
configuration or modify characteristics of an existing configuration
VERITAS Dynamic Multipathing
VERITAS Volume Manager software actively supports multiported disk arrays. It
automatically recognizes multiple I/O paths to a particular disk device within an
array. Called Dynamic Multipathing (DMP), this capability provides increased
reliability by providing a path failover mechanism. If one connection to a disk is lost,
VERITAS Volume Manager continues to access the data over the remaining
connections. This multipathing capability also provides greater I/O throughput by
automatically balancing the I/O load uniformly across multiple I/O paths to each
disk device.
112 Sun Fire V445 Server Administration Guide • August 2006