An international financing corporation recently purchased a DS6000 system, and needs it to be compatible with several IBM System p, IBM System i and existing IBM ESS devices that it currently maintains. The main use of the system will be copy service functions, but system administrators are also interested in configuring the system to maximize performance for the accounting department, while maintaining reliability for the service level agreements that they have with the proprietary applications and e-mail department. How can the DS6000 system be configured to meet these requirements?
Clients such as this financial corporation should use the DS Storage Manager
tasks to customize a logical configuration that is compatible with existing
devices and meets the needs of internal customers. The accounting department
is focusing more on reliability than performance; therefore, the resulting DS6000
configuration will include higher-capacity, 300-GB DDMs, formatted for
RAID 5. The other groups are more focused on performance, so the resulting configurations
will include lower-capacity, 73-GB DDMs formatted for RAID 10.
The system administrator would take the first step by creating six arrays, each
comprising two 4-disk array sites to meet the requirements of the host using
73-GB DDMs. The second step is to put the arrays into ranks and define
the storage type as fixed block. The system administrator then creates the extent
pool and adds the newly created ranks to the extent pool. Two extent pools are
created for each machine. The final step is to create the necessary volumes
from the extent pool to present to the host. Similar steps would be completed
for the other two systems.
The resulting configuration comprises three DS6000 systems, configured with
different RAID levels and capacities to meet the needs of the internal customers.