Specifications

Escala Tower PL & S, E, T System Hardware
Chapter 3: External Storage and SAN Subsystems 86/116
9es3s1c3.doc
Rev 5.9
02/12/2003
7. SAN - Infrastructure Components
The following paragraphs describe the SAN infrastructure components of the Escala offer. This offer
does not include bridges.
7.1. [e-mail]!
[e-mail]! is now available from the Storage BU catalog. Refer to Storage BU for updated information.
7.1.1. Product Overview
Storage Area Networks (SAN) bring new opportunities to implement storage architectures delivering
unpreceding performance and flexibility to the infrastructure of information systems. They also
increase the complexity of these information systems, due to the deployment of dedicated storage
networks, and new storage services (such as disk array or library sharing between multiple servers).
Bull [e-mail]! enables storage administrators to efficiently manage SAN for Escala and Express5800
servers running AIX 4, 5L, Windows NT or Windows 2000.
[e-mail]! is a multi-tiered administration tool, which consolidates the management of multiple servers,
SAN infrastructure devices (switches, bridges, and hubs), and RAID disk subsystems. This
management tool provides administrators with:
•
An automatic discovery of the SAN topology and disk subsystems, and tape drives reachable from
the managed servers.
•
A graphical display of the complete SAN topology, simplifying the understanding of devices
interconnections and relations, the control of physical cabling, and the storage allocation decisions.
•
A centralized allocation of the SAN attached disk resources to the managed servers. By simply
selecting information such as a server’s name in a list, LUNs can be assigned to servers to increase
the storage resources useable by the server, or de-assigned, thus freeing resources which will
become available for other servers. LUNs can be assigned to individual servers, or can be shared
between multiple servers.
•
LUN allocation can be modified from scripts, using the command line interface available on each
SAN attached server but also on the management server.
•
An access control mechanism ensuring data security and confidentiality for SAN attached disk
resources. Each server can only access to the storage resources it has been assigned.
•
A centralized monitoring of the SAN managed components (Fibre Channel switches, RAID disk
subsystems), with automatic update of displayed icons in case of failure detection and correction.
•
An interface enabling to customize event management actions, through the activation of
administrator defined scripts.
•
A consolidation of configuration information across multiple tools (SMIT, WebSM, Navisphere®
for DAS, EMC Control Center for Symmetrix, ATF, PowerPath, Windows NT Disk
Administrator), enabling to display within a single window the relation between AIX logical
volumes, volumes groups, hdisks, disk subsystems or Windows NT disk numbers, drive letters and
RAID volumes within subsystems.
•
Multi-domain facilities, to manage independently multiple SANs or group of AIX and Windows
NT servers with attached storage resources.