Digital Media Storage Solution Installation Guide
12
© Copyright 2010, IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.
SOLUTION RESTRICTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
There are several important aspects to the configuring of the SAN that must be understood.
The first is that the SAN design is architected to avoid logical drive failover in the storage
subsystem. This is accomplished by employing a meshed fabric where each HBA on the
server can see both controllers on the storage subsystem. The second aspect has to deal with
access to the shared logical drives. There are three types of shared logical drives; Metadata,
Journal, and Data. All systems (MDC‟s and Clients) must be able to see the Data LUNs. The
MDC‟s must also be able to both see the Metadata and Journal LUNs. It is important that the
clients do not have access to the Metadata or Journal LUNs.
When configuring the storage partitioning within the storage subsystem, the methodology is as
follows:
All HBA‟s in the MDC‟s will be defined within a single host definition (called MDCs?). This
host definition will have the Metadata and Journal LUNs directly mapped to this host
definition.
All Clients have their own host definitions. If desired, all clients that have the same OS can
have their HBA‟s combined within a single host definition.
All Clients and the MDC‟s will be assigned to a single host group (called StorNext?). All of
the Data LUNs will be assigned to that host group.
HBA’s
Connections
Zone
MDC
Single or
multiple (typical)
Up to four
All ports see Controller A and Controller B on
DSxxxx
MDC
- Limit number of defined
paths to optimize initialization time. There are few MDC‟s in
comparison to clients, so this choice should not be as restrictive as below. This is not a hard
requirement, but is recommended.
Most configurations consist of two MDC‟s for high availability. Both MDC‟s must have the
same configuration; OS, HBA‟s, Driver Levels, etc
Client
Single (typical)
or multiple
Up to two
All ports see Controller A and Controller B on
DSxxxx
Client
– Limit number of defined paths to four to optimize initialization time. This is not a hard
requirement, but is recommended.
Storage
Controller
A
Up to 8
All ports see all MDC and client ports
Controller
B
Up to 8
All ports see all MDC and client ports
