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The VCS DiskGroup agent has a configurable option PanicSystemOnDGLoss. It enables fast failover of application on loss of storage connectivity or when disk group commands are not responding. On extremely busy systems, it can cause halting of the system due to consecutive monitor timeouts. Prior to VCS 5.1, it was set to on (1) by default. Based on feedback, we changed the default from on (1) to off (0). However, we could still only turn on/off the behavior. With VCS 6.0, we have added flexibility to set it to a value based on the use case.

0: Do not halt the system.

1: Halt the system if either disk group goes into disabled state or the disk group resource faults due to monitor timeout.

2: Halt the system if disk group goes into disabled state.

3: Halt the system if disk group resource faults due to monitor timeout.

We are working on "SmartIO" feature for the next release of Storage Foundation, which can save customers a ton of money.

How do customers save a ton of money with SF "SmartIO" feature?

SF “SmartIO” feature results in the following,

1. Increases Server utilization by IO bottleneck elimination
2. Support for low latency and high throughout IO, by using flash storage present in the server
3. Reduction in the IO load on storage controllers, as most of the application IO needs is served by “SmartIO” layer.

As a result, the number of servers required for same application throughput is reduced, storage commoditization happens because there is no need for high end storage controllers and the number of storage controllers required is also reduced as IO needs from storage array is much lower. All of the above saves cost for SF customers - Savings on both Capital expenses and Operational expenses....

I spend a lot of time with customers discussing the value of using Storage Foundation. A question I get asked a lot these days is "Brian that all sounds great, but what do I need to do to install it on existing systems". This is a very good question particularly since Storage Foundation is perfect to facilitate not only server platform migrations but storage migrations also. Customers can quickly see the advantages of a solution like Storage Foundation but what are the practicalities of retrofitting it? High level there are two forms of migrations. Offline migration where filesystems are offline during the conversion process and Online. Online migrations still incur an outage at the first stage (an umount and remount of filesystems) but the conversion is done while the filesystems are mounted.  To help pull this information together I have written a short document that outlines the offline version for all the Operating Systems. There are also links to the documents...