Lenovo Storage V7000 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 V7000 node canisters.

Enclosures

RAID MDisk features

You can use the Lenovo Storage V7000 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 IBMEasy Tier function. By using this mode, volumes can take advantage of the better performance of the higher speed flash drives.

Up to 240 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

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 Lenovo Storage V series. Host connections to the Lenovo Storage V7000 are either SCSI over the Fibre Channel SAN, Fibre Channel over Ethernet SAN, or iSCSI over an Ethernet network.

For a list of the supported host operating systems, see http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/support/storage/ssic/interoperability.wss

Multipathing software

For more information, see http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/support/storage/ssic/interoperability.wss

User interfaces

The Lenovo Storage V7000system provides these user interfaces:

The management GUI, a web-accessible graphical user interface (GUI) that supports flexible and rapid access to storage management information
A command-line interface (CLI) that uses Secure Shell (SSH)
Service assistant, a web application that helps troubleshoot and resolve problems on a node canister

Application programming interfaces

The Lenovo Storage V7000system 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.