Sun Microsystems StorEdge 3000 Series, Best Practices Manual

Page: 19 / 86

Chapter 1 Introduction 3
configuration. It is prudent to use other RAS best practices, such as traditional
backup-and-restore strategies and host-based multipathing and clustering, to ensure
network reliability. Sun Microsystems makes available a wide variety of white
papers and product documentation that provide specific information to help you
plan or upgrade the architecture of your systems.
■
The Solaris 10 operating system provides built-in multipathing support for FC
storage devices. Consider upgrading to the Solaris 10 operating system in order to
take advantage of this multipath support. This functionality is described in the
Solaris Fibre Channel and Storage Multipathing Administration Guide :
http://docs-pdf.sun.com/819-0139/819-0139.pdf
Earlier versions of the Solaris operating system do not contain this built-in
multipathing support. Sun SAN Foundation Suite software, including Sun
StorEdge Traffic Manager, provides some of this functionality. For more
information, refer to the Sun StorEdge SAN Foundation Software 4.4
Guide to
Documentation :
http://docs-pdf.sun.com/817-3670-12/817-3670-12.pdf
■
A feature article on Sun's BigAdmin System Administration Portal, “Backup,
Restore, and Disaster Recovery on a System With Zones Installed” describes
useful security procedures that take advantage of features in the Solaris operating
system and in third-party backup software, including some useful links to other
system administration documentation:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/backup_zones.html
■
Another useful feature article, “Installing and Configuring Sun Cluster 3.1 09/04
Software for High-Availability Applications” provides an excellent overview of
strategies “to design an environment where services can migrate between
individual servers so that a reboot of a single machine never causes a service
downtime. Sun's solution to architecting these highly available services is
combining the software product, Sun Cluster, with the appropriately sized
servers, shared storage, and network topology.” It also describes the interaction of
Sun Cluster environments with Volume Manager software, and contains an
excellent list of related links:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/install_cluster.
html
■
A useful IDC white paper sponsored by Sun Microsystems, “Meeting Business
Objectives Through Unified and Simplified Storage,” describes a wide spectrum
of present and emerging best practices, including tiered storage; unified data
replication; and automated provisioning, expansion, and data protection tasks
across heterogeneous storage systems. While the specific business cases
referenced in this article include some software features currently found in
higher-end arrays than the Sun StorEdge 3000 family, this functionality is rapidly
migrating to workgroup storage arrays:
http://www.sun.com/storage/white-papers/idc_virtualization.pdf