52 Netra 440 Server System Administration Guide • August 2004
Volume Management Software
Volume management software lets you create disk volumes. Sun Microsystems offers
two different volume management applications for use on the Netra 440 server:
■ VERITAS Volume Manager (VVM) software
■ Solaris™ Volume Manager software
Sun’s volume management applications offer the following features:
■ Support for several types of RAID configurations, which provide varying degrees
of availability, capacity, and performance
■ Hot-spare facilities, which provide for automatic data recovery when disks fail
■ Performance analysis tools, which enable you to monitor I/O performance and
isolate bottlenecks
■ A graphical user interface (GUI), which simplifies storage management
■ Support for online resizing, which enables volumes and their file systems to grow
and shrink online
■ Online reconfiguration facilities, which let you change to a different RAID
configuration or modify characteristics of an existing configuration
VERITAS Dynamic Multipathing
VERITAS Volume Manager software actively supports multiported disk arrays. It
automatically recognizes multiple I/O paths to a particular disk device within an
array. Called Dynamic Multipathing (DMP), this capability provides increased
reliability by providing a path failover mechanism. If one connection to a disk is lost,
VVM continues to access the data over the remaining connections. This multipathing
capability also provides greater I/O throughput by automatically balancing the I/O
load uniformly across multiple I/O paths to each disk device.
Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager
A newer alternative to DMP that is also supported by the Netra 440 server is Sun
StorEdge Traffic Manager software. Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager is a server-based
dynamic path failover software solution, used to improve the overall availability of
business applications. Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager (previously known as
multiplexed input/output, or MPxIO) is included in the Solaris OS.
