Understanding ISP

VERITAS Intelligent Storage Provisioning (ISP) allows you to organize and manage your physical storage by creating virtual storage devices, application volumes. You can use such volumes in the same way as traditional volumes in VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM).

ISP creates application volumes from available storage with the required capabilities that you specify. To achieve this, it selects storage by consulting the externally defined rule base for creating volumes, and compares this with the properties of the storage that is available.

ISP provides the following main functionality:

• Creation and removal of application volumes.
• Organizing storage by grouping into storage pools.
• Resizing a volume while it is online.
• Moving or evacuating subdisks of a volume.
• Adding mirrors and columns to a volume while it is online.
• Removing mirrors and columns from a volume while it is online.
• Relocating a subdisk of a volume while it is online.
• Changing the capabilities of a volume while it is online.
• Creating volume snapshots using software or hardware.
• Reallocation of storage to preserve the capabilities of a volume.

ISP is capable of understanding Storage Area Network (SAN) topology and of efficiently using the available intelligent storage. ISP interacts with other VERITAS components, where these are available, such as the VERITAS Array Integration Layer (VAIL) and the SAN Access Layer (SAL), to take appropriate actions when configuring intelligent storage in a SAN environment. See Configuring ISP to Work with SAL for details of how to set up ISP so that it can use information that is provided by SAL.

This book describes the command-line interface to ISP, and the language that is used for writing new rules, capabilities and templates. For a description of the graphical interface to ISP that is provided by the VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VEA), see the VERITAS Enterprise Administrator Getting Started guide and VEA online help.