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EMC Symmetrix V-Max and SAP Applied Technology Abstract This white paper examines deployment of SAP with EMC ® Symmetrix ® V-Max™ arrays. Details of new features provided by Symmetrix V-Max arrays are documented with practical examples for storage, Basis, and database administrators. January 2010

EMC Symmetrix V-Max and SAP Symmetrix V-Max and SAP Applied Technology Abstract This white paper examines deployment of SAP with EMC ® Symmetrix V-Max™ arrays. Details of new features

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Page 1: EMC Symmetrix V-Max and SAP Symmetrix V-Max and SAP Applied Technology Abstract This white paper examines deployment of SAP with EMC ® Symmetrix V-Max™ arrays. Details of new features

EMC Symmetrix V-Max and SAP Applied Technology

Abstract

This white paper examines deployment of SAP with EMC® Symmetrix® V-Max™ arrays. Details of new features provided by Symmetrix V-Max arrays are documented with practical examples for storage, Basis, and database administrators.

January 2010

Page 2: EMC Symmetrix V-Max and SAP Symmetrix V-Max and SAP Applied Technology Abstract This white paper examines deployment of SAP with EMC ® Symmetrix V-Max™ arrays. Details of new features

Copyright © 2010 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.

THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED “AS IS.” EMC CORPORATION MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.

For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com

All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

Part Number h6914

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Table of Contents Executive summary ............................................................................................4 Introduction.........................................................................................................4

Audience ...................................................................................................................................... 4 Technology overview .........................................................................................5

Storage device support ................................................................................................................ 5 Enterprise Flash Drives................................................................................................................ 5 Auto-provisioning with Symmetrix V-Max .................................................................................... 6 Virtual LUN (VLUN) Migration feature ......................................................................................... 7

Tiered storage .......................................................................................................................... 8 TimeFinder improvements ........................................................................................................... 9 Large volume support .................................................................................................................. 9 TimeFinder/Clone cascading clones............................................................................................ 9 TimeFinder/Snap re-create ........................................................................................................ 10 SRDF/Extended Distance Protection......................................................................................... 10 Virtual Provisioning new features and changes......................................................................... 12 SRDF Enginuity Consistency Assist .......................................................................................... 12 SRDF/A adding or removing devices......................................................................................... 12 Remote TimeFinder/Clone restore to SRDF R1........................................................................ 13 SRDF/Star with an R22 device .................................................................................................. 13

Additional capabilities......................................................................................13 RAID Virtual Architecture (RVA) ................................................................................................ 13

Conclusion ........................................................................................................13

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Executive summary The EMC® Symmetrix® V-Max™ Series with Enginuity™ is the next generation of the Symmetrix product line. Built on the strategy of simple, intelligent, modular storage, it incorporates a new scalable fabric interconnect design that allows the storage array to seamlessly grow from an entry-level configuration into the world’s largest storage system. The Symmetrix V-Max provides improved performance and scalability for demanding enterprise storage environments while maintaining support for EMC’s broad portfolio of platform software offerings.

The Enginuity operating environment for Symmetrix version 5874 is the latest Enginuity release supporting the Symmetrix V-Max storage arrays. With the release of Enginuity 5874, Symmetrix V-Max systems now deliver new software capabilities that improve capacity utilization, ease of use, business continuity, and security.

The Symmetrix V-Max also maintains customer expectations for high-end storage in terms of availability. High-end availability is more than just redundancy; it means nondisruptive operations and upgrades, and being “always online.” Beyond previous Symmetrix generations, V-Max provides:

• Nondisruptive expansion of capacity and performance at a lower price point

• Sophisticated migration for multiple storage tiers within the array

• The power to maintain service levels and functionality as consolidation grows

• Simplified control for provisioning in complex environments

Many of the new features provided by the new EMC Symmetrix V-Max platform can reduce operational costs for customers deploying SAP solutions, as well as enhanced functionality to enable greater benefits. This white paper details those features that provide significant benefits to customers utilizing SAP.

Introduction The Enginuity Operating Environment provides the intelligence that controls all components in an EMC Symmetrix storage array.

Enginuity is an intelligent, multi-tasking, preemptive storage operating environment that controls storage data flow. It is completely devoted to storage operations and optimized for the service levels required in high-end enterprise environments. While it shares many characteristics with the operating systems typically used to run large host computers, Enginuity is more specialized and specifically optimized for storage-based functions. It is driven by real-time events related to the input and output of data. It applies self-optimizing intelligence to deliver the ultimate performance, availability, and data integrity required in a platform for advanced storage functionality. A prerequisite for complex, demanding, risk-intolerant IT infrastructures, Enginuity—coupled with Symmetrix—is the essential foundation technology for delivering advanced and cost-effective high-end storage services.

Enginuity, as a proven storage operating environment, carries all of its extended and systematic development forward in each successive Symmetrix platform generation—a major operational and investment protection benefit to users. This means that all of the reliability, availability, and serviceability features, all of the interoperability and host operating systems coverage, and all of the application software capabilities developed by EMC and its partners continue to perform productively and seamlessly even as underlying technology is completely refreshed. All of these features and capabilities are fully operational from day one in each succeeding generation of Symmetrix, including the V-Max platform.

Audience This white paper is intended for SAP Basis administrators, database administrators, storage administrators and architects, customers, and EMC field personnel who want to understand the implementation of new features and functions that can provide additional benefits in an EMC Symmetrix V-Max environment.

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Technology overview

Storage device support The new Symmetrix V-Max offers improved disk drive support in the areas of performance and capacity. The following is a list of the newer capabilities of the Symmetrix V-Max. Please note that V-Max now supports only 4 Gb drives on the back-end loop.

• Ultra-high performance: Flash (SSD) 200 GB 400 GB

• High performance: 4 Gb FC (15k) 146 GB 300 GB 450 GB

• Price / performance: 4 Gb FC (10k) 400 GB

• High capacity: SATA (7.2k) 3 Gb SATA - Adapted to 4 Gb FC using NorthStar 1 TB

These disk drives form an extensive price performance offering that enables customers to get the most out of their SAP deployments by choosing the disk storage tier most appropriate to the SAP data that is resident on it.

Enterprise Flash Drives Symmetrix V-Max is the second generation of Symmetrix to support Enterprise Flash Drives. The previous generation supported 73 GB and 146 GB Flash drives with a 2 Gb attachment. Now the new V-Max supports 200 GB and 400 GB Flash drives with a 4 Gb attachment. With Flash drives, EMC has created a new ultra-performance storage tier, “Tier 0,” that removes previous performance limitations imposed by magnetic disk drives.

For years, the most demanding enterprise applications have been limited by the performance of magnetic disk media. Tier 1 performance in storage arrays has been constrained by the physical limitations of hard disk drives. Enterprise Flash Drives for Tier 0 deliver unprecedented performance and response times, which are benefits well suited for demanding SAP infrastructure configurations.

Enterprise Flash Drives dramatically increase performance for latency-sensitive business applications such as SAP. Enterprise Flash Drives, also known as solid state drives (SSD), contain no moving parts, which removes much of the storage latency delay associated with traditional magnetic disk drives. A Symmetrix V-Max with Enterprise Flash Drives can deliver single-millisecond application response times and up to 30 times more I/O operations per second (IOPS) than traditional Fibre Channel hard disk drives (HDD). Additionally, because there are no mechanical components, Flash drives consume significantly less energy than hard disk drives. When replacing a larger number of HDDs with a lesser number of Enterprise Flash Drives, energy consumption can be reduced by up to 98 percent for a given IOPS workload.

The high-performance characteristics of Enterprise Flash Drives eliminate the need for organizations to purchase large numbers of traditional HDDs, while only utilizing a small portion of their capacity to satisfy the IOPS requirements of SAP solutions. The practice of underutilizing an HDD for increased performance is commonly referred to as short-stroking. Enterprise Flash Drives can increase database performance for SAP and eliminate the need to short-stroke drives, thus keeping storage footprint and power consumption to a minimum and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

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Auto-provisioning with Symmetrix V-Max Symmetrix V-Max with Enginuity 5874 provides storage and system administrators with a simplified model for storage provisioning. This new storage provisioning model is referred to as Auto-provisioning. Auto-provisioning allows sets of HBAs (identified by World Wide Names or WWNs) to be associated with a set of Symmetrix devices and a set of FA ports on the Symmetrix. This set is called an initiator group. This enables the processing of the initiator group as a unit and automates the storage provisioning steps of LUN mapping and LUN masking for each WWN to FA port to device relationship.

The following are example commands.

1. Create the storage group, which defines the specific Symmetrix devices that will be presented to the host.

symaccess -sid 1261 create -name QASdb -type storage devs B82:Bc1

2. Create the director group, which defines the directors to which the devices are to be mapped, and through which the host will be able to access the devices as defined in the storage group.

symaccess -sid 1261 create -name QASdbport -type port -dirport 7e:0,10e:0

3. Create the host initiator groups, which define the WWNs of the host bus adapters that are used by the host.

symaccess -sid 1261 create -name licoa025 -type initiator -wwn 10000000c944d8f symaccess -sid 1261 add -name licoa025 -type initiator -wwn 10000000c944d012

4. Define the view, which binds the previously defined groups. The creation of the view will cause the Symmetrix to execute mapping and masking operations as necessary to make the LUNs available on the ports specified to the WWNs specified.

symaccess -sid 1261 create view -name QAShost -storgrp QASdb -portgrp QASdbport -initgrp licoa025

The implementation of the Auto-provisioning functionality may be viewed pictorially in Figure 1:

Figure 1. Auto-provisioning logical configuration

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Virtual LUN (VLUN) Migration feature This new feature offers the ability to transparently migrate LUNs from differing tiers of storage as shown in the previous section as well as from differing tiers of protection. The LUNs can be migrated to either unallocated space (also referred to as unconfigured space) or to configured space, which is defined as existing Symmetrix LUNs that are not currently assigned to a server—existing, not-ready volumes—within the same subsystem. The data on the original source LUNs is cleared using instant VTOC once the migration has been deemed successful. The migration does not require swap or DVR space, and is nondisruptive to the attached SAP databases and other internal Symmetrix applications such as TimeFinder® and SRDF®. The valid migration combinations of drive types and protection types for the migration are summarized in the following tables.

Figure 2. Virtual LUN Eligibility Tables The device migration is completely transparent to a host on which SAP is running since the operation is executed against the Symmetrix device; thus the target and LUN number are not changed and SAP operations are uninterrupted. Furthermore, in SRDF environments, the migration does not require customers to re-establish their disaster recovery protection after the migration.

This Virtual LUN feature leverages the newly designed virtual RAID architecture in Enginuity 5874, which abstracts device protection from its logical representation to a server. This powerful approach allows a device to have more simultaneous protection types such as BCVs, SRDF, concurrent SRDF, and spares. It also enables seamless transition from one protection type to another while servers and their associated applications and Symmetrix software are accessing the device. This new architecture is a significant, quantum change from previous RAID implementations and is only available with the Symmetrix V-Max platform.

The Virtual LUN feature offers the SAP community the ability to effectively utilize SATA storage — a much cheaper, yet reliable, form of high-capacity storage. It also facilitates fluid movement of data across the various storage tiers present within the subsystem — the realization of true “tiered storage in the box.” Thus, Symmetrix V-Max becomes the first enterprise storage subsystem to offer a comprehensive “tiered storage in the box,” ILM capability that complements the customer’s tiering initiatives. Customers can now achieve varied cost/performance profiles by moving lower-priority application data to less-expensive

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storage, or conversely, moving higher-priority or critical application data to higher-performing storage as their needs dictate.

Tiered storage Tiered storage is the process of maintaining storage of varying performance characteristics within the same array or across multiple arrays. Tiered storage gives administrators the flexibility to utilize their resources effectively by aligning high-end storage technology to the appropriate information value. For example, highly active data can be placed on high-performing storage tiers, like Enterprise Flash Drives or 15k rpm drives, providing improved performance and user experience. An important enabler for the correct use of storage tiers that match business needs is the ability to move data without disrupting the users of business applications such as SAP. Symmetrix V-Max Virtual LUN technology enables migration of data between storage tiers within the same array. Virtual LUN operates at a LUN-level granularity and therefore can be utilized in migration of data based on file systems, DB2 partitions, Oracle table spaces, SQL Server file groups, and any other data that is fully contained in a group of host devices.

Reducing TCO can be accomplished by placing highly accessed and performance-critical data on the fastest (and usually more expensive) storage tiers, like 15k rpm disks, or EFD, and placing less-accessed data on lower-cost large-capacity drives, such as 19k rpm and SATA drives. Companies must examine their Information Lifecycle Management and service level strategies to determine which SAP data requires the highest performance. This analysis should be monitored and revised throughout the lifetime of the SAP landscape as requirements continuously change. Symmetrix V-Max provides an extensive set of solutions for lowering overall TCO while improving application availability, protection, and service levels.

Specific use cases for SAP are best carried out with collaboration between the SAP administrators, DBAs, and EMC storage administrators. The use cases enable the moving of data transparently from tier to tier based on changing performance (moving to faster or slower disks) or availability requirements (changing RAID protection on the array). This migration can be performed transparently without interrupting database access with only a minimal impact to performance during the migration.

Within an SAP landscape there are times when a non-production instance needs a good level of performance. As an SAP project progresses through phased go lives, it may be convenient and time saving for the functional team to have access to the phase n-1 sandbox. This can be accomplished by placing a clone of the sandbox data on SATA drives and providing access to functional team members. As each phase of the project is put in place this phase n-1 SAP reference instance may continue to be updated using TimeFinder/Clone. If for some reason the functional team’s performance requirements change, Symmetrix Virtual LUN technology can be used to transparently move the LUNs to standard Fibre Channel drives to meet new or temporary service level requirements.

The following sample commands show how to move two LUNs of an SAP instance with a DB2 LUW database from RAID 6 drives on Fibre Channel 15k rpm drives to Enterprise Flash Drives. The new symmigrate command, which comes in EMC Solutions Enabler 7.0, is used to perform the migrate operation. The source Symmetrix hypervolume numbers are 200 and 201, and the target Symmetrix hypervolumes on the Enterprise Flash Drives are A00 and A01.

1. A file (migrate.ctl) is created that contains the two LUNs to be migrated. The file has the following content:

200 A00 201 A01

2. The following command is executed to perform the migration:

symmigrate -sid 1261 -name db2_mig -f migrate.ctl establish The db2_mig name associated with this migration can be used to interrogate the progress of the migration.

3. To inquire on the progress use the following command:

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symmigrate -sid 1261 -name db2_mig query

The two DB2 LUW LUNs are migrated without having to impact application availability.

TimeFinder improvements The classic underlying Enginuity mechanism responsible for creating mirrored local replicas will no longer be supported on Symmetrix V-Max and its associated Enginuity 5874 microcode. However, the classic TimeFinder/Mirror user command sets will continue to be supported by TimeFinder/Clone using the TimeFinder/Mirror emulation capabilities. Thus, starting with Enginuity 5874, there is a single technology in use that is clone emulation. Furthermore, whenever TimeFinder/Mirror detects a Symmetrix controller running at Enginuity level 5874 and later, it will automatically set the mode to clone emulation.

Customers using SAP and TimeFinder/Mirror will not experience changes other than the increased capability to make more copies of their SAP databases than before.

Large volume support Enginuity 5874 introduces the ability to create and utilize hypervolumes that can be up to 240 GB cylinders in size. These large volumes may be configured and used in a similar manner to the normal standard devices that users are already familiar with. While large volumes can co-exist alongside the older volumes there are limitations to their use imposed by certain access methods (operating system restrictions), and other independent vendors’ software.

Large volumes can be configured instead of using metavolumes where appropriate. This simplifies the provisioning of storage where LUNs are required to be greater than 60 GB, which was the previous limitation on Symmetrix DMX-4 and earlier.

One caution needs to be observed when deploying large volumes on Symmetrix V-Max. Since the larger hypervolumes are supported by the same number of spindles (in a non-virtual provisioned environment) it may be advisable to deploy these large volumes in a configuration that is not performance-critical as the number of physical drives serving the I/Os is reduced in relation to the capacity presented to the host.

TimeFinder/Clone cascading clones SAP customers often have expressed the desire to be able to create multiple replicas of given SAP SID data. They may want to be able to create a backup image of the given DB and be able to retain that image, but then also be able to repurpose that image for a reporting system, for example. Typically those replicas are required to be fully independent – the backup image should not be a TimeFinder/Snap off the production instance as that can direct workload back to the production volumes. Equally, keeping the copy to be used for reporting independent of the backup image is required to isolate workloads (for example, if the reporting instance is in operation when the next backup cycle occurs, this would generate a significant workload, and impact the resync of the backup clone).

TimeFinder/Clone version 7.0 with Enginuity 5874 supports cascading clones. Cascading clones is the ability for a clone operation to take place with a device that is already involved in a clone operation. For example, you can clone device A to device B and then device B to device C. Figure 3 depicts the relationships.

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A B C clone clone

Database

Figure 3. Cascading clones The database on the A volumes is cloned to the B volumes. After the copy has completed, the B volumes can be cloned to the C volumes. The key issue here is that the incremental relationship between A and B remains intact and subsequent clones from A to B are incremental within the storage controller.

TimeFinder/Snap re-create Customers using TimeFinder/Snap with SAP have asked for a more efficient way to re-create existing Snap sessions. Presently they have to terminate the snap, perform a create, and then an activate. If none of the volume relationships had changed this seemed to be a lot of unnecessary work. In the 5874 microcode there is a new SNAP recreate function that replaces the terminate and create functions. There is lot less data to manipulate and consequently the operation is also much faster.

SRDF/Extended Distance Protection Enginuity 5874 supports a new feature called SRDF/Extended Distance Protection (SRDF/EDP). This feature allows a much more optimized and efficient structure to a three-site SRDF topology in that it allows the intermediate site – Site B, in an A to B to C topology – to have a new device type known as a diskless R21 (Figure 4). This arrangement requires that the secondary (Site B) subsystem be at Enginuity 5874 or later (and Symmetrix V-Max), while Sites A and C could be running either DMX-4 with Enginuity 5873 or Symmetrix V-Max with Enginuity 5874 or later. Thus, SRDF/EDP allows replication between the primary Site A and tertiary Site B without the need for RDF BCVs or any replication at the secondary Site B. Figure 4 depicts a simple SRDF/EDP configuration.

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Primary Site A

Enginuity 5773 or

Secondary Site B

Enginuity 5874

Tertiary Site C

Enginuity 5773 or 5874 5874

Figure 4. SRDF/EDP configuration

This diskless R21 differs from the real disk R21, introduced in an earlier release of Enginuity, which had three mirrors – one at each of the three sites. The diskless R21 device is a new type of device that does not have any local mirrors. Further, it has no local disk space allocated on which to store the user data, hence it reduces the cost of having disk storage in the site B subsystem. This results in only two full copies of data, one on the source Site A and one on the target Site C.

The purpose of a diskless R21 device is to cascade data directly to the remote R2 disk device. When using a diskless R21 device, the changed tracks received from the R1 mirror are saved in cache until these tracks are sent to the R2 disk device. Once the data is sent to the R2 device and the receipt is acknowledged, the cache slot is freed and the data no longer exists on the R21 Symmetrix.

This advantageous approach to three-site SRDF means that a customer will only need a Symmetrix system with vault and SFS drives plus enough cache to hold a common area, user data/updates (customer data), and device tables, thereby reducing the overall solution cost. It highlights a serious attempt to address a “greener alternative” to the device sprawl brought about by multisite business continuity requirements and is sure to be welcomed by many customers deploying three-site DR solutions. The R21 diskless device still uses the device table like a disk device and will also consume a symm number. Further, they are not addressable by a host or assigned to a DA and hence cannot be accessed for any I/Os. Other restrictions on diskless R21 devices include the following:

They can only be supported on GigE and Fibre Channel directors. They cannot participate in dynamic sparing since the DA microcode blocks any type of sparing and

doing iVTOC against them. They cannot be RDF paired with other diskless devices. When used for SRDF/A operations, all devices in the SRDF/A session must be diskless; non-diskless

device types are not allowed. All Symmetrix replication technologies other than SRDF (TimeFinder, Snap, and Clone) will not

function with diskless devices configured as either the source or the target of the intended operation. However, SDDF sessions are allowed on diskless devices.

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Virtual Provisioning new features and changes Virtual Provisioning™, generally known in the industry as “thin provisioning,” enables organizations to improve ease of use, enhance performance, and increase capacity utilization for certain applications and workloads. The implementation of Virtual Provisioning for Symmetrix DMX-3 and DMX-4 has been enhanced in Symmetrix V-Max storage arrays and directly addresses improvements in storage infrastructure utilization, as well as associated operational requirements and efficiencies.

In combination with increased hypervolume sizes provided by Symmetrix V-Max, Virtual Provisioning can allow applications to scale dramatically without having to provision excessive quantities of storage in the beginning. Virtual Provisioning and large volume support allow SAP databases and applications to grow easily and noninvasively.

Since the initial release of Virtual Provisioning, certain features have been added to the base product. Two important changes are listed next.

Draining of data devices Starting with Enginuity 5874, when a data device is disabled, it will first drain any active extents to other, enabled data devices in the thin storage pool. Once the draining is complete, the device is disabled and can then be removed from the pool. Benefits of drain functionality include the ability to:

• Expand the thin storage pool and perform proactive rebalancing of the data devices within the pool • Correct an environment where the Virtual Provisioning configuration was overprovisioned when first

created • Reduce the I/O rate to one or more physical drives containing data devices • Reduce the I/O rate to one or more DAs containing data devices • Remove all data devices from one or more physical drives, possibly in preparation for removal of

physical drives with a plan to replace them with higher-capacity drives. Snap and support of RAID 5 Enginuity 5874 also delivers full support for RAID 5 protected data devices for Virtual Provisioning. Data devices may now be protected as 3+1 RAID 5 and 7+1 RAID 5. Also, all replication technologies supported with Virtual Provisioning will be supported for RAID 5 data devices, including TimeFinder/Clone, TimeFinder/Snap, and SRDF/S or SRDF/A.

SRDF Enginuity Consistency Assist SRDF-ECA provides consistency protection for synchronous mode volumes by performing suspend operations across all SRDF/S volumes in a consistency group or a named subset of all volumes in a composite group. In Enginuity versions 5773 and earlier, in a concurrent SRDF environment, SRDF-ECA could only be enabled on a single link or on both links of the concurrent SRDF relationship at the same time. Enginuity 5874 allows for the definition of an independent SRDF-ECA consistency group on each of the links of a concurrent SRDF R1 volume, providing the ability to disable consistency protection on one link, while still maintaining consistency on the second leg.

SRDF/A adding or removing devices The functionality of adding and removing devices to an existing SRDF/A SRDF group has been greatly enhanced in Enginuity 5874. The functionality, called the consistency exempt feature, provides the ability to dynamically add and remove volumes from an active SRDF/A session. Furthermore, it does this without affecting the state of the session or the reporting of the SRDF pair state for each of the volumes in the active session that are not the target of the operation. This is achieved by marking the volumes being added or removed as “exempt” from being considered when calculating the consistency state of the volumes in the SRDF/A session, or when deciding if the SRDF/A session should be dropped to maintain dependent write consistency on the R2 side. Setting the consistency exempt flag on a volume allows the volume to be

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added or removed from an active SRDF/A SRDF group using either a create, delete, or move operation without requiring the other volumes in the SRDF group to be suspended prior to the operation.

Remote TimeFinder/Clone restore to SRDF R1 The feature that has existed in previous versions of the Enginuity code has been enhanced in Enginuity 5874. The feature now allows the R2 volume of a TimeFinder/Clone setup to be used to perform a SRDF restore to its partnered R1 volume while a TimeFinder/Clone restore is in progress to the R2.

SRDF/Star with an R22 device The R22 device is a new SRDF volume type introduced in Enginuity 5874. A concurrent R2 (R22) volume is one whose two remote mirrors are paired with a different R1 volume. However, only one of the R2 mirrors may be receiving data from its corresponding R1 volume at any given time. The primary intended use for an R22 volume is to simplify fail over situations and improve resiliency in SRDF/Star environments. With the introduction of the R22 volume the need to create recovery volume pairings during SRDF/Star setup is negated.

The relevance of the SRDF enhancements in VMware Virtual Infrastructure environments will be available shortly as an update to the TechBook, Using EMC Symmetrix Storage in VMware Virtual Infrastructure Environments, available on Powerlink®.

Additional capabilities

RAID Virtual Architecture (RVA) With Enginuity 5874, the RAID-X naming changed to RAID Virtual Architecture (RVA). RVA extends the DMX-4 RAID 6 design to support all current RAID types in a single back-end engine. It is not a new RAID protection level in that you still have unprotected RAID 1 (mirrored), RAID 5, and RAID 6 as before. The CKD RAID 10 is still four RAID 1 devices grouped together with metastriping. RVA does hide the back-end management of the RAID groups. Now RAID protection is associated with individual mirrors of a device and not the whole device itself. RVA is an enabling technology for Symmetrix that has been used to implement other features such as an enhanced Symmetrix Virtual LUN migrator (discussed on page 7), and the expectation that it will be used with other features in the future.

Conclusion Symmetrix V-Max introduces a number of new hardware features such as the scalable fabric interconnect design that allows the storage array to seamlessly grow from an entry-level configuration into the world’s largest storage system. An SAP landscape backed by the power and flexibility of the Symmetrix V-Max marks a new standard for storage environments. Symmetrix V-Max provides improved performance and scalability for today’s and tomorrow’s demanding enterprise storage environments, allowing for far-reaching growth. The Symmetrix V-Max storage controller running Enginuity Operating Environment version 5874 when used in conjunction with Solutions Enabler 7.0 provides many new features and functionality including Auto-provisioning and Enhanced Virtual LUN Technology to improve data center efficiency and improve the ROI for SAP instances deployed in this environment.

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