HP-UX 11i v3 Native Multi-Pathing for Mass Storage (August 2012)

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Audience
This document describes the native multi-pathing feature offered by the mass storage subsystem on HP-
UX 11i v3. It is intended for system administrators or operators.
For a comprehensive description of all the features of the HP-UX 11i v3 mass storage subsystem refer
to
The Next Generation Mass Storage Stack HP-UX 11i v3 white paper.
Introduction
HP-UX 11i v3 has re-architected the mass storage subsystem to significantly enhance scalability,
performance, availability, manageability, and serviceability in a SAN environment. The re-architected
subsystem increases maximum configuration limits to address very large SAN configurations while
delivering performance and availability with automatic native multi-pathing, parallel I/O scan,
optimized I/O forwarding, and CPU locality.
Multi-pathing is native to HP-UX 11i v3. It is built in to the mass storage subsystem and is available to
applications without any special configuration. Pre-11i v3 multi-pathing add-on products are no
longer necessary on HP-UX 11i v3.
Native multi-pathing offers the following features:
• Optimal distribution of I/O traffic across lunpaths to LUNs
• Dynamic discovery of lunpaths and LUNs
• Automatic monitoring of lunpaths
• Automatic lunpath failover and recovery
• Intelligent I/O retry algorithms to deal with failed lunpaths
• Lunpath authentication to avoid data corruption