Tuning System Storage DS8000 series storage systems

IBM® System Storage® DS8000® series storage systems are designed to be fast and manage heavy I/O.

About this task

A DS8000 series storage system can be configured in RAID 5 and RAID 10 arrays. The quantity of disk units in an array is fixed. Stripe or segment sizes are set automatically. You cannot tune cache for a DS8000 series storage system; for example, you cannot disable cache for the LUNs that are used for the server database. The inability to tune cache is usually not a problem because these systems typically have large amounts of cache.

Procedure

For best performance, follow these guidelines:

Place the Tivoli® Storage Manager database, active log, archive log, and disk storage pools on separate extent pools.
This arrangement uses more storage, but achieves better performance.
Distribute the server components over as many ranks as possible. Ranks are on different device adapter pairs.
Minimize other applications that are sharing the ranks that Tivoli Storage Manager uses.
Use as many adapters as possible to access LUNs.
If you are using a DS8000 series storage system for multiple Tivoli Storage Manager servers, put all the server databases on one set of ranks. Put all the storage pools for the servers on another set of ranks.
Test and monitor the results for the disk system configuration in your environment.