IBM Shared Storage Pools use cases

1. © 2015 IBM Corporation
IBM Power Systems
Storage virtualization methodology for Agile deployments
Costa Lochaitis
kostal@za.ibm.com

2. © 2015 IBM Corporation2
© 2015 IBM Corporation2
Objective
• The overall objective is to simplify the IBM Power Systems
environment to enable the customer to provision Virtual Machines
quicker and simpler.
• The above approach should not put the customer at any risk and
the current architecture governance should still apply.
• The purpose of this document is to provide the customer with a
methodology in selecting the correct storage virtualization option for
their Power Systems environment.

3. © 2015 IBM Corporation3
© 2015 IBM Corporation3
Support Statements
• Currently IBM PowerHA does support Shared Storage Pools
technology.
• https://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/FLASH10806
• Currently there is no official support statement around Spectrum
Scale and Shared Storage Pools.
• The issue has been raised with development and we are awaiting feedback
• http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSFKCN/com.ibm.cluster.gpfs.doc/gpfs_faqs/gpfsclustersfaq.html
• Article explaining PowerVC provisioning in mixed environment with
SSP & NPIV
• http://chmod666.org/index.php/exploit-the-full-potential-of-powervc-by-using-shared-storage-pools-linked-clones-powervc-secrets-
about-linked-clones-pooladmmksnapmkclonevioservice/
• Mixing SSP and NPIV on the same Virtual Machine is supported
• Comments from Development
I chatted with our dev guys and there are no restrictions. If you think about ssp its just a vscsi model with different backend storage
so we have supported vscsi boot volumes with npiv storage since the beginning.
The key is we typically only document restrictions so you are free to mix and match storage types. vscsi or npiv or ssp(which is pretty
much vscsi to the client)

4. © 2015 IBM Corporation4
© 2015 IBM Corporation4
4

5. © 2015 IBM Corporation5
© 2015 IBM Corporation5
NPIV for
Production

6. © 2015 IBM Corporation6
© 2015 IBM Corporation6
Prod & Non-Prod
I/O Intensive NPIV
Prod
SAN based replication
required NPIV
Prod & Non-Prod
Not I/O intensive
SSP
Prod & Non-Prod
PowerHA SSP
Prod & Non-Prod
Spectrum Scale SSP
Boot disk
NPIV
Data disk

7. © 2015 IBM Corporation7
© 2015 IBM Corporation7
Q&A