Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning 5.0 Solutions Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, May 2008

Chapter
1
Introduction to ISP
Intelligent Storage Provisioning (ISP) is a feature of Veritas Storage
Foundation
TM
that provides new approaches to virtualizing network storage. ISP
allows application volumes to be created from the available storage that adhere
to a set of specified criteria. Using ISP simplifies and standardizes storage
provisioning, allows the redundancy and performance characteristics to be
preserved over time, and helps to eliminate human error when allocating
storage to volumes.
This solutions guide is one in a series from Symantec. Solution guides present
products in a real-world context, and provide concise guidelines for commonly-
performed procedures. This solutions guide describes scenarios where ISP can
be used to enforce installation standards and to simplify common storage
provisioning tasks.
A larger companion book, the Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage
Provisioning Administrator’s Guide, which is provided as part of the
documentation set that is included with the Storage Foundation product, serves
as a comprehensive reference to ISP concepts, operations, administration and
the ISP specification language.
Together these books offer a comprehensive approach to understanding the
complexity and power of ISP as applied to storage management.
The remainder of this chapter introduces some basic but essential ISP concepts
and terminology. Subsequent chapters apply these concepts to implement
various storage provisioning scenarios. For a more detailed explanation on any
topic in this chapter, see the Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage
Provisioning Administrator’s Guide.