VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide

The Benefits of ISP
16 VERITAS Storage Foundation ISP Administrator’s Guide
◆ All ISP operations preserve the original intent of the volumes. There is no possibility that
operations such as grow, evacuate, add mirror, or add column can accidentally degrade the
reliability or performance capabilities of a volume.
◆ ISP is SAN-aware and understands SAN attributes. It is also capable of using VAIL to learn
the capabilities of LUNs.
◆ The annotation service, provided in the VEA graphical user interface, allows you to define
attributes for LUNs that lie outside their discovered hardware characteristics, and to assign
values to these attributes.
Limitations of ISP
The following features of vxassist are not currently supported in ISP:
◆ The vxassist utility includes a number of hard-coded rules that it uses when selecting
storage. For example, vxassist may configure objects on separate controllers without being
instructed to do so. ISP requires that the selection of storage is made explicit through rules,
capabilities and templates.
◆ ISP supports space-optimized instant snapshots and full-sized instant snapshots that are created
on pre-prepared volumes. It does not support third-mirror break-off snapshots.
◆ Disk group split and join is supported at the level of storage pools. A snapshot of an
application volume should be created within a clone pool if it is to be moved between disk
groups.
◆ Templates are not provided in the base product to support the special features of EMC
Symmetrix arrays.