The ETERNUS disk storage systems below are equipped with a storage capacity virtualization function that uses Thin Provisioning technology.
Storage device name | Firmware version |
|---|---|
ETERNUS4000 models 400 and 600 | V20L30 or later |
ETERNUS8000 models 800, 1200, and 2200 | V20L30 or later |
Thin provisioning technology virtualizes and allocates storage resources, thus enabling the physical capacity of the storage to be reduced. Environments where thin provisioning have been installed manage physical disks as a common disk pool, and allocations to servers are treated as allocations to a virtual volume. When writing to a virtual volume, physical disks are allocated from the disk pool in accordance with the size of the data being written. Physical disks can be extended in accordance with the disk pool busy rate without affecting the servers. This enables users to start operation using only a small physical disk capacity to make large capacity virtual disk allocations to servers, thus keeping the initial investment low (small start).
In this software, the following functionality is provided for the above ETERNUS disk storage systems with Thin Provisioning.
This function makes the associations between virtual volumes and physical disks visible. The relationship management window graphically displays the associations between the configuration that is virtualized by means of thin provisioning (disk pool and virtual volumes) and the physical configuration (RAID groups and physical disks). This function makes it easy to check the affected location when a physical disk fault or other problem occurs.
This function monitors the disk pool threshold values and performs capacity management. Threshold values are established for the physical disk pool and these values are monitored so that consumption of the physical capacity does not cause disk pool shortages. When the disk busy rate reaches the threshold value, an alarm notifies the user, thus preventing operation stoppages. This function also makes changes to the capacity of the physical disk pool visible. It displays graphs of the amount of disk pool capacity used, both now and in the past, thus giving users forewarning of the capacity becoming exhausted and indicating when physical disks might need to be extended.
See
For details, refer to "6.6 Thin Provisioning management".
Notes on storage capacity virtualization operation
There are following concerns when managing storage capacity virtualization operations.
This product cannot construct (design and setup) a thin provisioning environment. Use ETERNUSmgr to construct the environment in advance.
This product cannot perform the following operations related to thin provisioning:
Performance monitoring of disk pools, virtualization volumes, and RAID Groups that contain disk pools
Setting and deleting of disk pools, virtualization volumes, and Affinity Groups that include virtualization volumes
