Oracle Solaris storage stack is a multi-layered modular stack, which consists of multiple layers with well-defined interfaces between them. The storage stack works together with other storage-related software to access or store data by using different transport protocols, which helps provide better performance, availability, and security. Oracle Solaris supports Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI, and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) transport protocols. These transport protocols enable you to connect to different types of storage devices such as a single disk, a tape device, or a large enterprise system. These devices have management command line options, which manage input and output (I/O) communication. The Oracle Solaris I/O multipathing feature enables these storage devices to have multiple paths to a host.
This chapter provides information about the I/O communication between the different components in a storage stack.