Storage & Clustering Community Blog

We've completed the work to merge the existing Storage Management and Clustering & Replication communities into a single community area. Since Connect launched last March, a good number of the storage posts and content have spanned the two communities. We realize that this means that many of you have been tracking content from both areas, and hope that this improvement will make it easier and faster for you to find and share information about Storage and High Availability products.

So what's new?  A Storage & Clustering community that includes Storage Foundation, Storage Foundation for Windows, Cluster Server, Cluster Server One, CommandCentral, FileStore, Volume Replicator, and SFHA Management Tool product information, all in one community. How will this help you? You won't see duplicated content between the two communities. You won't have to go to two communities to view product forums. We will have technical expertise regarding Storage and High...

Congratulations to our Symantec Data Center Game winners for the month of July! Winners were selected from a random drawing of names from the top 50 scores from both games for the month of July.

• First Place - Deepak Waghmare, of Miele Security won 1,000 Symantec Connect Reward points
• Second Place - Frank019 won 500 Symantec Connect Reward points
• Third Place - John Atkins, of Lifeway won 250 Symantec Connect Reward points

As registered users of Symantec Connect, these prize winners will have the opportunity to continue to accumulate points or redeem the points now for a prize. Click here to read more about the Symantec Connect Rewards program.

Coming in Fall, anyone who plays can submit their name at the end of the game, to be entered into a random drawing, no need to be in the Top 50, although we will still be tracking the top 50 scores for users to view. The winner of the...

Introduction:

This test regards the new smartmove feature introduced with MP3:

Enviroment:

OS AIX 5300-07-02-0806
Storage Fondation 5.0MP3RP1
Storage 2 LUNS XP24K 100GB

Test:
Mirror an empty filesystem

Initial situation:

diskgroup with a volume of  97.615 GB

root@/ #vxprint -Qqthg smartdg
dg smartdg      default      default  3000     1239178875.70.tx088sd1
dm disk0        xp12k0_0     auto     65536    204713728 -
dm disk1        xp12k0_1     auto     65536    204713728 -
v  smartvol0    -            ENABLED  ACTIVE...

Written by: Thomas Cornely

What’s the Hardware Zero Reclaim functionality?  It basically refers to the array’s ability to scan a thin lun and look for pages of physical storage that contain ‘all zeroes’. When they find such a page, they reclaim the page (i.e. detach it from the thin lun) and put it back in the free pool. They can do this because the array returns ‘0’ to any I/O read it received on ‘unallocated space’ in a thin lun.

Who’s doing it?

Most hardware vendors are coming out with similar functionality. IBM XIV was the first one to have it. 3PAR has it. NetApp has it (they actually have true dedup in the array). Now Hitachi has it.

What are limitations of the Hardware Zero Reclaim functionality?

Hardware Zero Reclaim relies on the presence of 0 in the array to do the reclamation. In the context of a thick to thin migration, the process would be as follows:

• start with 1...