Operating environment

To use the system, you must meet the minimum hardware and software requirements and ensure that other operating environment criteria are met.

Minimum requirements

You must set up your operating environment with a minimum of one pair of Lenovo Storage V series node canisters.

Enclosures

A Lenovo Storage V series expansion enclosure can be used only with a Lenovo Storage V series control enclosure. A Lenovo Storage V series control enclosure can manage only a Lenovo Storage V series expansion enclosure.

RAID MDisk features

You can use the management GUI or the command-line interface (CLI) to create a RAID MDisk from the local drives. RAID (other than RAID 0) offers redundancy and the ability to recover from the physical failure of a drive.

A RAID MDisk can be composed of flash drives or hard disk drives (HDDs).

Creating a storage pool that contains both flash drive MDisks and HDD MDisks enables the automatic data-placement mode of the Easy Tier function. By using this mode, volumes can take advantage of the better performance of the higher speed flash drives.

Up to 120 drives are supported in the system with RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10.

Distributed array features

These arrays, which can contain 4 - 128 drives, also contain rebuild areas that are used to maintain redundancy after a drive fails.

Supported RAID levels are Distributed RAID 5 and Distributed RAID 6.

To enhance performance of a distributed array, all of the drives must come from the same, or superior, drive class. Each drive class is identified by its drive_class_id.

Drive features

Both flash drives and HDDs include these features:
  • Each drive is a 2.5-inch or a 3.5-inch serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drive.
  • Drives are hot-pluggable and hot-swappable.

Supported hosts

Fibre Channel now supports direct connection, in addition to storage area network (SAN). The only method not supporting a direct connection is Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

SAN fabric function is available only if a Fibre Channel option is installed. Otherwise, this information does not apply.

In a storage area network (SAN) environment, host systems are application servers that access data from the storage controllers that are connected to the SAN. Hosts that are running in a number of operating environments can connect to the storage by using the system .

For a list of the supported host operating systems, see the following Web site:

https://datacentersupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/storage/lenovo-storage/v3700v2/6535

For a list of the supported host operating systems for Lenovo Storage V5030, see https://datacentersupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/storage/lenovo-storage/v5030/6536

Multipathing software

For more information about the multipathing software of Lenovo Storage V3700 V2 and Lenovo Storage V3700 V2 XP, see https://datacentersupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/storage/lenovo-storage/v3700v2/6535

For more information about the multipathing software of Lenovo Storage V5030, see https://datacentersupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/storage/lenovo-storage/v5030/6536

User interfaces

The system provides these user interfaces:

Application programming interfaces

Thesystem provides an application programming interface that is called the Common Information Model (CIM) agent. The CIM agent supports the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) of the Storage Network Industry Association.