Friday, April 4, 2014

IBM SVC (SAN Volume Controller) - or - Ease of use Storage provisioning

Okay friends.. in this post am gonna take an overview of IBM SVC GUI. How things look and how it works.

IBM SVC mainscreen or the launch page which gives a summary of the storage being provided from the "SAN Volume Controller". I dont know if SVC has some of its internal storage but when it comes to support of External storage through this SAN volume controller - it is a good choice. It supports Storage provision and Migration of data from Heterogeneous to Heterogeneous storage arrays.
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But wait - Did I say anything bout the SVC Architecture. No - Am not going to cover anything bout the architecture but again - a look at how the SVC logical structure looks like.
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Claiming storage from other arrays:

When the storage is masked to the ports of SVC, the LUNs are automatically or manually organized in different storage pools. (The storage pools can be user defined or dynamic names). Once the LUNs are added to different storage pools, the capacity of the pool will be visible as shown in the picture.
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IBM SVC Volumes - Yes !! they are called as volumes in SVC but not LUNs. A summary of how LUNs look like.
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Using the "new Volume" create wizard:
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As you can see from the above pic, volume creation options - Generic Volume, Thin-Provision, Mirror, Thin Mirror and Compressed. I use thin-provision as am concerned bout space. Using this one page wizard, users can create a volume or instead we can create and map it straight away to a host. Once a volume is created, it will be given a unique ID and a unique LUN ID. Both can be used for quick references.

Lets have a look at a sample volume properties.
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IBM SVC Diagnostics - Troubleshooting an unknown issue:
In SVC we can create support bundles which in turn can be uploaded onto the IBM Support cases for analysis. The support bundles can be big enough to upload it onto the support site, so work with your IBM personnel to get it working.

Hope you liked this post. I would be glad to hear any views.

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