The new Lenovo(R) Storage V7000 system combines hardware and software to control the mapping of storage into volumes in a SAN environment. This system provides many benefits to storage administrators, including simplified storage administration, outstanding flexibility and efficiency, unique hardware accelerated real-time compression, and enterprise-class performance, function, and reliability. In this e-Learning overview, you will learn basic information about the product and how it works.
The new Storage V7000 system includes special hardware to perform data compression and decompression at high speeds. There is one compression hardware adapter built in to the base model, with a second optional compression accelerator card available. This configuration optimizes storage, allowing users to compress ten times more data than ever before, which reduces the amount of physical storage required without sacrificing performance. Note that it is mandatory to use compression with Storage V7000 systems.
All Storage V7000 systems include rack-mounted units called enclosures. There are two types of enclosures: control and expansion. With Storage V7000 systems, control enclosures are 24-drive models, while expansion enclosures can be 12- or 24-drive models. Each enclosure has two canisters and two power supplies located at the back. A system can support more than one control enclosure, and a single control enclosure can have up to 20 expansion enclosures.
There are always two node canisters in each control enclosure. One control enclosure represents one I/O group. Any expansion enclosures that are attached to a specific control enclosure also belong to the same I/O group.
The system also includes an easy-to-use management GUI, which helps you to configure, troubleshoot, and manage the system.
This combination of hardware and software provides storage virtualization capabilities, where you can manage physical resources as shared virtual resources. In this way, all the internal and external physical storage appear to the hosts as virtual storage, which can be used to centrally manage and allocate capacity as needed.
Here is how it works. Enclosures include physical drives that are logically grouped into redundant arrays of independent disks, or RAID.
Instead of mapping to hosts directly, the arrays present groups of managed disks to the system to be included in a pool of virtual storage. The storage pool can include disks from either internal or external storage arrays.
You can create storage pools based on performance and other characteristics.
The I/O groups translate the managed disks into storage pools, which are then translated into one or more volumes. These volumes are then presented to a host system.
You can create different types of volumes, including generic, thin-provisioned, mirrored, thin mirrored, and compressed volumes.
A generic volume is a fully allocated volume. For example, if you create a 10 GB generic volume, then 10 GB of space is allocated. When you create a 10 GB thin-provisioned volume, nothing is allocated until a host writes data to it.
With a thin-provisioned volume, the volume size presented to a host system is larger than the real storage actually allocated to the volume. This saves space if many of the blocks within the volume are not used. When additional real storage is required, you can manually or automatically expand the real storage.
With mirrored volumes, there are two volume copies, and the host is only aware of the original volume. Mirrored volumes can enable a volume to remain online even when some of the associated storage systems cannot be accessed.
By using a thin mirror volume, you can allocate the required physical space on demand and have several copies of a volume available.
You can use compressed volumes to help ensure efficient use of storage resources. When the volume is created, the data is compressed, so that less real storage capacity is required. There is an optional 32 GB RAM upgrade available which gives a total of 64 GB per canister. This additional RAM is only usable by compressed volumes.
After the volumes are created, you can specify which hosts can access the volumes.
You can attach Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, which is known as FCoE, and iSCSI hosts to the Storage V7000 system. For more information, see the Attaching hosts e-Learning modules in IBM Knowledge Center.
With an additional license, the new Storage V7000 system provides advanced SAN functions, including data migration, Easy Tier(R) storage, and Copy Services. You typically migrate data to move workloads from external storage systems that are about to be replaced to a Storage V7000 system. Data migration is performed without interruption to the host I/O.
Volumes are created by mapping disk extents to volume extents. Data migration essentially changes this mapping. Migration can be performed at the volume, disk, or the extent level, depending on the purpose of the migration.
Several types of Copy Services are provided that help you to migrate, back up, and recover data. These functions are performed by creating synchronous and asynchronous copies of volumes. These Copy Services include FlashCopy(R), Metro Mirror, and Global Mirror.
The FlashCopy function copies data instantaneously from a source volume to a target volume. This copy is taken at a particular point in time as hosts continue to access the data. You must create a mapping between the source volume and the target volume. A mapping can be created between any two volumes of the same size in a clustered system. FlashCopy consistency groups perform point-in-time copy functions for multiple volumes. You can set up FlashCopy mappings and consistency groups using the management GUI.
Metro Mirror is a Copy Service that provides a continuous, synchronous mirror of one volume to a second volume. The secondary volumes can be located in the same clustered system or in different clustered systems. The different systems can be up to 300 kilometers apart, so by using Metro Mirror you can make a copy to a location offsite or across town. Because the mirror is updated in real time, no data is lost when a failure occurs, so Metro Mirror is generally used for disaster-recovery purposes, where it is important to avoid data loss.
Global Mirror is a Copy Service that is very similar to Metro Mirror. Both provide a continuous mirror of one volume to a second volume. But with Global Mirror, the copy is asynchronous. You do not have to wait for the write to the secondary cluster to complete. So, for long distances, performance is improved compared to Metro Mirror. However, if a failure occurs, you might lose data. Global Mirror works well for data protection and migration when recovery sites are more than 300 kilometers away. Before creating a Metro Mirror or Global Mirror copy, you need to first establish a partnership between two clustered systems using the management GUI.
With an additional license, Easy Tier® can be included with this system and other Storage products. Easy Tier responds to the storage pools that contain a mixture of flash, enterprise SAS, and nearline SAS storage. The system automatically and non-disruptively moves data between these tiers of storage to optimize volume performance. The Easy Tier function eliminates manual intervention when assigning highly active data on volumes to faster responding storage, and assigns inactive data to slow responding storage. In this dynamically-tiered environment, data movement is seamless to the host application regardless of the storage tier in which the data resides. Manual controls exist so that you can change the default behavior, such as turning off the Easy Tier function on storage pools that have more than one tier of storage.
Now that you understand the basics of how the product works, virtualization, volume creation, and advanced SAN functions, visit IBM Knowledge Center for additional e-Learning modules.