IBM SAN Volume Controller
SAN Recovery - IBM SAN Volume Controller
IBM SAN volume Controller (SVC) is a block storage virtualization appliance. SVC is based on Commodity Parts Storage System (Compass) architecture, developed at the IBM Almaden Research Center.
SVC uses an in-band architecture in which data flowing between a host and a storage controller moves through an SVC node. SVC uses a virtualization layer in a Fibre Channel storage area network (FC SAN).
SVC is deployed as a cluster of nodes, each of the nodes having at least four Fibre Channel ports. A node runs a Linux kernel, and a specialized virtualization storage software environment provides proprietary clustering capability. Each pair of nodes is called an I/O group and provides write data cache mirroring across the pair. If there is any I/O path failure, the I/O group alone performs non-disruptive failover via IBM Subsystem Device Driver (SDD) software.
Important Features of the Latest Release SVC 4.3
- SVC allows indirection or mapping from virtual LUN to physical LUN.
- It allows servers to access SVC as if it were a storage controller.
- SVC allows data migration; it can move data from Mdisk to Mdisk while maintaining I/O access to the migrated data.
SVC holds the world record for SPC-1 performance benchmarks by the Storage Performance Council for SPC version 4.2.0, returning over 272K iops.
