IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) V5.1.0 has been designed to provide significant new capabilities to assist storage administrators in their responsibilities, enabling them to manage even broader and more complex storage infrastructures and to implement strategic disaster recovery plans. V5.1.0 delivers enhancements to SVC in the areas of Metro Mirror and Global Mirror, FlashCopy, volume management, security, and system scalability through its 64-bit architecture.

SVC remote copy functions now provide the ability to establish partnerships with up to three additional clusters. A virtual disk may still be only in one Metro Mirror or Global Mirror relationship. In addition, the scalability of SVC remote copy solutions is expanded by enabling up to 8192 concurrent remote copy relationships. These enhancements help provide storage administrators with greater flexibility in designing a disaster recovery solution.

Within a single cluster, the SVC FlashCopy function now provides the capability to use FlashCopy to copy data rapidily from the target to the source of an existing FlashCopy mapping without rebuilding or re- establishing the existing mapping. This function gives administrators flexibility to recover data if a problem occurs in the data center. Administrators can also leverage their use of this and other SVC FlashCopy functions with the new IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager.

The original SVC space efficient VDisk function is augmented with the new capability of SVC's VDisk Mirroring to remove unused space (zeros) when creating a new VDisk copy. The original VDisk copy can subsequently be removed from operation to obtain the full space savings. This capability enables administrators to more easily recover disk space when migrating to space-efficient virtual disks.

In order to continue the focus on storage management and configuration cost control, SVC V5.1 provides the means to utilize a lower cost Ethernet network infrastructure for iSCSI host attached to the cluster. This support will be provided through the built in Ethernet ports present on all 64-bit SVC hardware models (2145 Models 8F2, 8F4, 8G4, 8A4, and CF8).

SVC increases the flexibility of the storage it provisions by raising the supported VDisk size to 256 TBs. For improved service, up to six e-mail servers can now be enabled to receive event notification from the SVC cluster. SVC V5.1 also introduces message classification to enable the administrator to determine the appropriate action based on the message designation of error or warning.

SVC interoperability now supports additional storage products including the EMC CLARiiON CX4 models, IBM System Storage DS5020, HP StorageWorks MSA2000, Xiotech Emprise 5000, and Hitachi AMS 2100, 2300, and 2500. Interoperability is also available for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.

SVC's reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) capabilities are updated in V5.1. As a complement to the existing SVC e-mail and SNMP trap notification facilities, SVC adds Syslog error event logging for administrators already using the Syslog protocol elsewhere in their environments. SVC V5.1 provides the Enterprise Single Sign-on client to interact with an authentication server such as an LDAP server, where login credentials and roles are centrally managed. Finally, SVC V5.1 augments the availability of the system by automating node recovery and reentry into a cluster following certain types of software faults.

SVC V5.1 is designed for substantially improved cluster performance when installed on the latest IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller 2145-CF8 Storage Engines. SVC also introduces unique software capabilities only available when running SVC V5 software on the 2145-CF8. First, the 2145-CF8 may optionally be ordered with the necessary adapter and up to four solid-state devices (SSDs) per storage engine. These devices must be configured using SVC VDisk Mirroring to provide redundancy and may be used like any other managed disk in the system. This enables storage administrators to migrate busy work loads to high performance SSDs for virtual disks running their most critical applications without interruption to host I/O. Next, when using space efficient VDisks in an I/O group hosted by 2145-CF8 storage engines, SVC V5.1 will detect if all zeros are being written in a write request and will not allocate disk space for such requests. This ability helps reduce the disk space used for space-efficient virtual disks and reduce space utilization concerns when formatting virtual disks.

SAN Volume Controller V5.1 Entry Edition (5639-VW2) increases its scope by managing configurations of up to 250 disk drives. Existing SVC V4.3 functions and additional functions included in SVC V5.1 are generally available to customers ordering either 5639-VC5 or 5639-VW2.
 
Program Number

• IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller Software V5.1.0 (5639-VC5)
• IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller Entry Edition Software V5.1.0 (5639-VW2)