HP P9000 External Storage Access Manager User Guide (AV400-96407, October 2011)

2 Planning, system requirements, and recommendations
This chapter provides requirements and recommendations for planning an ESAM system.
HP strongly recommends contacting your HP representative in the planning and implementation
of the software.
Planning workflow
ESAM's foundation rests on the Continuous Access Synchronous technology, therefore, this manual
refers to several operations that are covered in detail in the HP P9000 Continuous Access
Synchronous User Guide. However, there are also major differences between ESAM and Continuous
Access Synchronous. For example, use of the quorum disk and multipath software on the host are
specific to ESAM.
This chapter covers the requirements and recommendations pertaining to ESAM. To set up ESAM:
• Consult planning and configuration information for volume pairs, data path configurations,
bandwidth sizing, RAID configuration, and so on in the HP P9000 Continuous Access
Synchronous User Guide.
• Follow the ESAM requirements and recommendations in this chapter for all of the above—plus
for quorum disk and multipath software information.
Required hardware
The following hardware is required for an ESAM system:
• P9500 storage systems must be installed on both the primary and the secondary sites.
• A host must be connected to both primary and secondary systems. See “Multipath software
and supported operating systems ” (page 12).
• An external storage system for the quorum disk. See “Quorum disk requirements ” (page 14).
• External storage system for data storage (optional). See “External storage systems ” (page 16).
• Data path connections between primary and secondary systems. See “Data path requirements
and recommendations ” (page 15).
• A physical path connection between the primary system and the external system hosting the
quorum disk.
• A physical path connection between the secondary system and the external system hosting
the quorum disk.
• Path connections from host to primary and secondary systems. Multipath software must be
installed on each host server for this purpose.
• If necessary, physical path connections between external storage and primary and/or
secondary systems.
Multipath software and supported operating systems
A multipath software package qualified with ESAM is required on each host platform for failover
support. Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager is multipath software qualified for the following host
platforms:
• AIX
• Linux
• Solaris
• Windows
12 Planning, system requirements, and recommendations