1
About Switched Shared Storage and SANs (Storage Area Networks)
1-13
About Fibre Channel Storage Systems and Networks (SANs)
Figure1-10 Sample SAN Configuration
Access Control with Shared Storage
Access control permits or restricts a server’s access to shared storage.
There are two kinds of access control:
•Configuration access control
•Data access control
Configuration access control lets you restrict the servers through
which a user can send configuration commands to an attached
storage system.
Data access control is provided by Storage Groups. During storage
system configuration, using a management utility, the system
administrator associates a server with one or more LUNs.
Each server sees its Storage Group as if it were an entire storage
system, and never sees the other LUNs on the storage system.
Therefore, it cannot access or modify data on LUNs that are not part
of its Storage Group. However, you can define a Storage Group to be
accessible by more than one server, if, as shown above, the servers
run cluster software.
Highly available cluster
SP A
LUN
LUN
LUN
LUN
LUN
LUN
LUN
Cluster
Storage Group
Database Server
Storage Group
Physical storage
systems with up to
100 disks per storage
system
Switch fabric
File Server Mail Server Database Server
Adapter
Adapter
Operating
system A
Adapter
Adapter
Operating
system A
Adapter
Adapter
Operating
system B
SP B
Switch fabric
Path 1
Path 2