The Lenovo Storage V series system combines hardware and software to control the mapping of storage into volumes and provides many benefits to storage administrators. These benefits include an easy-to-use management GUI, improved storage utilization, and data backup and migration. In this e-Learning overview, you will learn basic information about the product and how it works.
The Lenovo Storage V series system includes rack-mounted units called enclosures. Each enclosure can either contain up to 24 two-and-a-half inch drives or up to 12 three-and-a-half inch drives. The enclosure also contains power supplies and canisters. There are two types of enclosures: control and expansion. A system has one or two control enclosures and each control enclosure supports up to six additional expansion enclosures.
The system also includes an easy-to-use management GUI, which helps you to configure, troubleshoot, and manage the system.
Drives are combined into arrays, and arrays of similar type are combined into pools. Volumes are then allocated from these pools. A control enclosure presents these volumes to host systems.
You can create different types of volumes, including mirrored and thin-provisioned volumes.
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.
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.
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, iSCSI, and SAS hosts to the Lenovo Storage V series system. FCoE connectivity is supported on certain models of Lenovo Storage V series. For more information, see the Attaching hosts e-Learning modules.
The Lenovo Storage V series system provides advanced SAN functions, including data migration and Copy Services. The IBM Easy Tier(R) function is also available with an additional license. One important use of the migration function is the importing of data from an existing storage controller. Data migration is performed with only a short interruption to the host I/O. This short interruption happens when the system is rezoned. It is important to note that you need a Fibre Channel connection to import data from an existing storage controller.
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.
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. The Lenovo Storage V series product supports the IBM FlashCopy(R) function. However, both Metro Mirror and Global Mirror are also supported if you have an additional license.
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.
Certain Lenovo Storage V series products include IBM System Storage(R) Easy Tier(R), which responds to the presence of solid-state drives (or SSDs) in a storage pool that also contains hard-disk drives (or HDDs). The system automatically and nondisruptively moves data between HDD and SSD storage to optimize volume response time. The Easy Tier function eliminates manual intervention when assigning highly active data on volumes to faster 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 both types of MDisks. Generic SSD and HDD tiers are supported.
Now that you understand the basics of how the product works, volume creation, and advanced SAN functions, see the information center and other e-Learning modules to learn more.