Storage Domains

Storage Domains give you the flexibility to store your data into logical groups that meet your storage requirements. Examples of such groups can include geographical location, or departmental function within your organization. You can also group your data by access frequency, or group your data by levels of confidentiality.

A Storage Domain is a virtual storage pool that consists of an assortment of drive groups. Each drive group contains drives of a particular Storage Class and of a particular capacity. The drive groups that comprise a Storage Domain can be of different Storage Classes. A Storage Domain can contain from 0 to 1024 drive groups.

An administrator can allocate a particular drive group to a specific administrator-defined Storage Domain. When no administrator-defined domains exist, all of the drive groups reside in the default Storage Domain.

Volume groups allow you to logically organize your data based on the data content or geographical location. Storage domains allow you organize your content based on physical properties of the storage pool, such as Storage Class or auto‑tiering capabilities.

Storage Domain Examples

Storage Domains enable storage administrators to assign logical volumes to specific Storage Domains. Such assignments can be made to reduce contention among volumes, to implement different levels of security for those volumes, or both. When more storage capacity is required, the administrator can add drive groups to the Storage Domain.

Storage administrators typically use Storage Domains for the following reasons:

User group separation: In this scenario, storage administrators can isolate application data to specific drive groups on a department basis (for internal cloud environments) or on a customer basis (in external cloud environments). This isolation eliminates interapplication contention for I/⁠O services and provides charge-back capabilities.
Protocol separation: In this scenario, storage administrators can place application data on separate drive groups that are based on protocol and connectivity. This separation eliminates any chance of interapplication contention for I/⁠O services. For example, an administrator could create a NAS domain and a SAN FC domain.
Application I⁠/O isolation: Storage administrators can create Storage Domains for use in specific applications and tiers of storage to eliminate unwanted drive group contention. For example, an administrator can place the Oracle DB indexes in a dedicated, SSD-based Storage Domain to isolate all other work from the indexes. The data table space and other components can be in a different Storage Domain.
Data security: Storage administrators can place logical volumes that contain sensitive data on a particular Storage Domain. If the data must be destroyed, the drives within those drive groups can be destroyed without the administrator having to be concerned with preserving less sensitive data. Placing those volumes in their own Storage Domain ensures that those volumes do not share drive groups with less sensitive material.
Drive group or hardware retirement: As drives age, the probability of failure increases. Storage Domains can efficiently move data to newer drive groups that have larger capacities.
Auto‑tiering: Storage administrators can place all auto‑tiered LUNs in a Storage Domain that is dedicated to the QoS Plus feature. The administrator can adjust the properties of the QoS Plus feature until the optimum configuration is found. The optimum configuration can then be used on other Storage Domains in the system.