Installation and Reference Guide HP StorageWorks Secure Path 3.0F Service Pack 4 for HP-UX 11i v1.0 and 11i v2.0 (5697-8001, March 2009)

Figure 2 Driver model structure
Agent
The Secure Path agent (spagent) is a daemon process that provides an interface for Secure Path
applications and utilities to communicate to the Secure Path drivers. The spagent daemon also
provides notification of path-change events through e-mail. You do not need to run the spagent
daemon for Secure Path drivers to provide full failover functionality. However, if you want an e-mail
notification, then you must run the spagent daemon. The only supported method to start and stop
the Secure Path agent is the spinit script.
The spinit script starts and stops the Secure Path agent /sbin/spagent.
Management tools
The Secure Path Manager (spmgr) is a command line utility that allows you to monitor and manage
Secure Path devices and change the configuration settings for drivers. See Managing Secure Path for
Active-Passive disk arrays for a description of spmgr commands.
The spinit script starts and stops the Secure Path agent /sbin/spagent.
Controller ownership
Storage systems that are multiple-bus capable generally contain a pair of redundant controllers and
support one of the following basic operational models:
• Active-Passive — In the Active-Passive model, all LUN’s are assigned ownership to one controller
of the pair for I/O processing. The other controller is inactive, but available as a substitute in case
of a failure on the active controller.
Secure Path for Active-Passive disk arrays16