Lenovo Storage V7000 overview

The IBMLenovo Storage V7000 system is a virtualizing RAID storage system.

IBMSpectrum Virtualizesoftware

Lenovo Storage V7000 is built with Spectrum Virtualize™ software, which is part of the Spectrum Storage™ family.

The software provides these functions for the host systems that attach to Lenovo Storage V7000:
  • Creates a single pool of storage
  • Provides logical unit virtualization
  • Manages logical volumes
  • Mirrors logical volumes
The system also provides these functions:
  • Large scalable cache
  • Copy Services
    • FlashCopy® (point-in-time copy) function, including thin-provisioned FlashCopy to make multiple targets affordable
    • HyperSwap® (active-active copy) function
    • Metro Mirror (synchronous copy)
    • Global Mirror (asynchronous copy)
    • Data migration
  • Space management
    • Easy Tier ® function to migrate the most frequently used data to higher-performance storage
    • Metering of service quality when combined with Spectrum Control Base. For more information, refer to the Spectrum Control Base documentation.
    • Thin-provisioned logical volumes
    • Compressed volumes to consolidate storage

Lenovo Storage V7000 hardware

The Lenovo Storage V7000storage system consists of a set of drive enclosures. Control enclosures contain disk drives and two node canisters. A collection of control enclosures that are managed as a single system is a clustered system.Expansion enclosures contain drives and are attached to control enclosures. Expansion canisters include the serial-attached SCSI (SAS) interface hardware that enables the node canisters to use the drives of the expansion enclosures.

Figure 1 shows the Lenovo Storage V7000 system as a traditional RAID storage system. The internal drives are configured into arrays and volumes are created from those arrays.

Figure 1. Lenovo Storage V7000 system as a RAID storage system
This figure shows an overview of a RAID storage system.

The Lenovo Storage V7000 system can also be used to virtualize other storage systems as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Lenovo Storage V7000 system virtualizing other storage systems
This figure shows an overview of viirutalizing other storage systems

The two node canisters in each control enclosure are arranged into pairs that are known as I/O groups. A single pair is responsible for serving I/O on a specific volume. Because a volume is served by two node canisters, there is no loss of availability if one node canister fails or is taken offline.

The Lenovo Storage V7000 system supports both regular and flash drives. In addition, a Lenovo Storage V7000 system without any internal drives can be used as a storage virtualization solution.

System topology

The Lenovo Storage V7000 node canisters can be arranged in different topologies.
Note: You cannot mix I/O groups of different topologies in the same system.
  • Standard topology, where all node canisters in the system are at the same site.
    Figure 3. Example of a standard system topology
    This figure shows an example of a standard system topology
  • HyperSwap topology, where the system is comprised of at least two I/O groups. Each I/O group is at a different site. Both nodes of an I/O group are at the same site. A volume can be active on two I/O groups so that it can immediately be accessed by the other site when a site is not available.
    Figure 4. Example of a HyperSwap system topology
    This figure shows an example of a HyperSwap system topology

System management

The Lenovo Storage V7000 nodes in a clustered system operate as a single system and present a single point of control for system management and service. System management and error reporting are provided through an Ethernet interface to one of the nodes in the system, which is called the configuration node. The configuration node runs a web server and provides a command-line interface (CLI). The configuration node is a role that any node can take. If the current configuration node fails, a new configuration node is selected from the remaining nodes. Each node also provides a command-line interface and web interface for performing hardware service actions.

Fabric types

I/O operations between hosts and Lenovo Storage V7000 nodes and between Lenovo Storage V7000 nodes and RAID storage systems are performed by using the SCSI standard. The Lenovo Storage V7000 nodes communicate with each other by using private SCSI commands.

FCoE connectivity is supported on Lenovo Storage V7000 Gen1 models 2076-312 and 2076-324 if the system software is upgraded to version 6.4. A Lenovo Storage V7000 Gen2 model 2076-524 can have up to eight 10 Gbps Ethernet ports per control enclosure when two 4-port 10 GbE host interface adapters are installed.

Table 1 shows the fabric type that can be used for communicating between hosts, nodes, and RAID storage systems. These fabric types can be used at the same time.

Table 1. Lenovo Storage V7000 communications types
Communications type Host to Lenovo Storage V7000 Lenovo Storage V7000 to storage system Lenovo Storage V7000 to Lenovo Storage V7000
Fibre Channel SAN Yes Yes Yes
iSCSI (1 Gbps Ethernet or 10 Gbps Ethernet) Yes No No
Fibre Channel Over Ethernet SAN (10 Gbps Ethernet) Yes Yes Yes
Parent topic: Technical overview