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March
2016 HA-AP Proxy Drives
Vendor Storage In-band Management
Some storage vendors use in-band management tools for configuring and monitoring their storage arrays. This means that they use SCSI commands sent through the FC SAN to perform management functions. There are two main approaches to in-band management: 1.
The SCSI commands are vendor-unique commands that may be sent to any LUN within the array. All LUNs are also capable of performing normal I/O functions. 2.
There are one or more special management LUNs. Generally such LUNs are dedicated for management and are incapable of performing most or all normal I/O functions. The SCSI commands used to talk to management LUNs may be vendor-unique, or they may be standard commands with alternate, non-standard meanings.
HA-AP Proxy for Transparent Storage Management
When HA-AP appliances are used to mirror storage, it is strongly recommended that no HBAs have direct connections to the storage. All storage access should be through commands sent to the HA-AP engines. This poses a challenge when in-band storage management is needed. It would appear that engines would need to be aware of all supported vendors’ management command sets. The Proxy Drives and Special Proxy Drives are ways to get around this need. Figure 1. Proxy for Transparent Storage Management ... Learn more >> |
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