Storage Management

Multihost storage makes disks highly available by connecting the disks to multiple Solaris hosts. Multiple hosts enable multiple paths to access the data, if one path fails, another one is available to take its place.

Multihost disks enable the following cluster processes:

• Tolerating single-host failures.

• Centralizing application data, application binaries, and configuration files.

• Protecting against host failures. If client requests are accessing the data through a host that fails, the requests are switched over to use another host that has a direct connection to the same disks.

• Providing access either globally through a primary host that “masters” the disks, or by direct concurrent access through local paths.

Volume Management Support

A volume manager enables you to manage large numbers of disks and the data on those disks. Volume managers can increase storage capacity and data availability by offering the following features:

• Disk-drive striping and concatenation

• Disk-mirroring

• Disk-drive hot spares

• Disk-failure handling and disk replacements

Sun Cluster systems support the following volume managers:

• Solaris Volume Manager

• Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster

• Veritas Volume Manager

Solaris I/O Multipathing (MPxIO)

Solaris I/O multipathing (MPxIO), which was formerly named Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager, is fully integrated in the Solaris Operating System I/O framework. Solaris I/O multipathing enables you to represent and manage devices that are accessible through multiple I/O controller interfaces within a single instance of the Solaris operating system.

The Solaris I/O multipathing architecture provides the following features:

• Protection against I/O outages due to I/O controller failures

• Automatic switches to an alternate controller upon an I/O controller failure

• Increased I/O performance by load balancing across multiple I/O channels

Hardware Redundant Array of Independent Disks Support

Sun Cluster systems support the use of hardware Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) and host-based software RAID. Hardware RAID uses the storage array's or storage system's hardware redundancy to ensure that independent hardware failures do not impact data availability. If you mirror across separate storage arrays, host-based software RAID ensures that independent hardware failures do not impact data availability when an entire storage array is offline. Although you can use hardware RAID and host-based software RAID concurrently, you need only one RAID solution to maintain a high degree of data availability.

Cluster File System Support

Because one of the inherent properties of clustered systems is shared resources, a cluster requires a file system that addresses the need for files to be shared coherently. In a Sun Cluster file system, a cluster file system enables users or applications to access any file on any node of the cluster by using remote or local standard UNIX APIs. Sun Cluster systems support the following cluster file systems:

• Solaris ZFS^TM

• UNIX file system (UFS)

• Sun StorEdge QFS file system and Sun QFS Shared file system

• Sun Cluster Proxy file system (PxFS)

• Veritas file system (VxFS)

If an application is moved from one node to another node, no change is required for the application to access the same files. No changes need to be made to existing applications to fully utilize the cluster file system.