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
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■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
