VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide

Chapter 1, Understanding ISP
Sample ISP Deployments
25
Arranging Storage by Attributes
You can use storage attributes to control how ISP assigns storage to application volumes. For
example, you can use confinement rules to restrict some volumes to a subset of LUNs which share
common attributes, such as caching to enhance I/O performance, or hardware RAID to provide
redundancy and/or enhance performance.
As described in “Policy” on page 6, not all attributes of LUNs are capable of being discovered
automatically. You can use the annotation service, provided in the VEA graphical user interface, to
manually attach such attributes to storage. An example of using attached attributes is shown in
“Example Usage of Attached Attributes,” where the templates can use the value of the Building
attribute to provide the availability capability of mirroring volumes between different locations at a
site.
Example Usage of Attached Attributes
Alternatively, you could specify appropriate separation rules to instruct ISP to mirror volumes
between buildings.
Another example of using attached attributes would be to tag certain LUNs within a storage pool as
having the best performance. You could then use confinement rules to ensure that certain volumes
are only configured from this storage, while the remaining storage is used for other volumes with
less critical performance requirements.
Storage Pool
Disk Group
Templates
Application Volumes
LUNs with
attached
attribute
Building = Bld1
LUNs with
attached
attribute
Building = Bld2
Templates are configured
to provide the capability
of mirroring application
volumes between buildings