Introduction To Storage Virtualization

Overview of the IBM Storwize V7000 system

This chapter provides an overview of the IBM Storwize V7000 architecture and includes a

brief explanation of storage virtualization.

The IBM Storwize V7000 solution provides a modular storage system that includes the capability to virtualize external SAN-attached storage and its own internal storage. The IBM Storwize V7000 solution is built upon the IBM SAN Volume Controller technology base and uses technology from the IBM System Storage DS8000 family.

IBM Storwize V7000 system is a clustered, scalable, and midrange storage system, and an external virtualization device.

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The IBM V7000 System is simple and easy to use, have a graphical user interface (GUI) that is designed to allow storage to deployed quickly and efficiently.

The GUI runs on the Storage, so there is no need for a separate console.The GUI contains pre configs called presets, and they are available fro creating volumes, IBM FlashCopy mappings and for setting up a RAID configuration.

When virtualizing external storage arrays, an IBM Storwize V7000 system can provide up to 32PB of usable capacity. The storage consists of one or two control enclosures and up to 18 expansion enclosures. Within each enclosure are two canisters. Control enclosures contain two node canisters and expansion enclosures contain two expansion canisters.

Before proceed I want to define some terms mostly used to describe the functions of V7000 Storage System:

Quorum Disk is a disk that contains a reserved area that is used exclusively for cluster management. The quorum disk is accessed when it is necessary to determine which half of the cluster continues to read and write data.

Snapshot is an image type that consists of a point-in-time view of a volume.

Storage Pool is a collection of physical disks or physical capacity that configured as RAID for example can contain one or more volumes.

Thin Provisioning is the ability to define a storage unit with a logical capacity size that is larger tha the physical capacity assigned to that unit.

Volume is a logical capacity that is visible to the hosts when is assigned.

There is four models of V7000 Storage System but in this article I will describe only two models, the model 2076-112 that have two node canisters, 16 GB of cache, internal dual power supply and 12 drive slots, and the 2076-24 that have 16 GB of cache, internal dual power supply and 24 drive slots with 2.5 inch.

For more information about V7000 Storage Models, please go to http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/storwize_v7000/index.html.

IBM Storwize V7000 front view for 2076-124, 224 and 324 enclosures

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Next, I will describe some features of IBM Storwize V7000