Specifications

Escala Tower PL & S, E, T System Hardware
Chapter 3: External Storage and SAN Subsystems 89/116
9es3s1c3.doc
Rev 5.9
02/12/2003
7.2. ASM V2 (AIX SAN Manager)
Discontinued: 31/12/2001.
This product is replaced by [e-mail]!, which is fully compatible with existing installations. [e-mail]! is
mandatory to manage SANs including the DAS 4700/4700-2.
7.2.1. 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’s AIX SAN Manager (ASM) enables storage administrators to efficiently manage SAN for AIX
servers and for Windows NT Servers. ASM is a multi-tiered administration tool, which consolidates
the management of multiple AIX and Windows NT servers, SAN, and RAID disk subsystems. This
management tool provides administrators with:
•
An automatic discovery of the SAN topology and disk subsystems reachable from the managed
AIX servers and Windows NT 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 AIX and Windows NT 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.
•
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 Disks 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.
•
An easy access to dedicated device management applications (running under AIX or with a Web
interface), such as AIX Navisphere, AIX Symmetrix Manager, Brocade’s WebTools, … A simple
click on a device icon starts the associated application.