IBM DS8000 manual Enterprise Remote Copy Management Facility eRCMF, Summary

the DS8000 Storage Hardware Management Console for the execution of the commands. The commands allow you to:

￿Create, modify, start, stop, and resume a Global Mirror session

￿Manage failover and failback operations including managing consistency

￿Perform planned outages

To monitor the DS8000 volume status and the Global Mirror session status, you can either use the DS Storage Manager or DS CLI.

15.7 Enterprise Remote Copy Management Facility (eRCMF)

eRCMF is a multi-site disaster recovery solution, managing IBM Total Storage Remote Mirror and Copy as well as FlashCopy functions, while ensuring data consistency across multiple machines. It is a scalable, flexible solution for the DS8000 with the following functions:

￿When a site failure occurs or may be occurring, eRCMF splits the two sites in a manner that allows the backup site to be used to restart the applications. This needs to be fast enough that when the split occurs, operations on the production site are not impacted.

￿It manages the states of the Metro Mirror and FlashCopy relationships, so that the customer knows when the data is consistent and can control on which site the applications run.

￿It offers easy commands to place the data in the state it needs to be in. For example, if the data is out of sync, the command resync will cause eRCMF to scan the specified volumes and issue commands to bring the volumes back into sync.

￿It offers a tool to execute eRCMF configuration checks. This check is intended to verify that the eRCMF configuration matches the physical DS8000 setup in the customer environment. This is required to discover configuration changes that affect the eRCMF configuration as well. Regular checks support customers in keeping the eRCMF configuration up-to-date with their actual environment; otherwise, full eRCMF management functionality is not given.

eRCMF is a IBM Global Services offering. More information about eRCMF can be found at:

http://www-1.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/so/its/a1000110

15.8 Summary

The new DS8000 enterprise disk subsystem offers broad support and superior functionality for all major open system host platforms. In addition, IBM provides software packages for many platforms that are needed to exploit all of the functionality. IBM also integrated DS8000 functionality into its family of storage management software products that help to reduce the effort of managing complex storage infrastructures, to increase storage capacity utilization and to improve administrative efficiency.

Chapter 15. Open systems support and software 331