Storage partitions

A storage partition allows for simplified and scoped management of the resources within the storage system or a larger Flash Grid environment. Storage partition acts as a virtual storage system with focus on the logical resources that are used by an application.

Within a storage partition, all volumes must be in volume groups, and hosts can only be mapped to volumes in the same storage partition. Only SCSI hosts connected by using Fibre Channel or iSCSI are supported in storage partitions. These rules ensure that storage partitions can be nondisruptively migrated to another system in the Flash Grid, or be configured for high availability without conflicting with other resources that exist on either of the systems.

New hosts, volumes, and volume groups can be created in a storage partition. However, existing storage resources within the system cannot be added directly to a partition. A draft partition can be used to construct a partition with existing objects that meets the requirements of a partition. Some of the requirements of partitions are not enforced while constructing a draft partition to allow addition of resources to the partition iteratively as the dependencies between application are identified and resolved. A draft partition can only be published when all the requirements of a partition are met. The GUI helps to add volume groups to the draft and indicate which volumes and hosts are added automatically. A draft partition cannot be migrated or made highly available.

Storage partitions can be configured to be highly available between two independent storage systems by associating a replication policy to the partition. Systems automatically ensure that the logical configuration, data, and management access are configured to be highly available by managing all provisioning activities and configuring the replication. For more information about high availability, see High availability.

Two storage partitions in different systems can be linked together to allow replication for disaster recovery for one or more volume groups within the partition. Volume groups within the partition can be configured with different replication policies, allowing for different recovery point objectives, or selective replication of a subset of the volume groups. For more information about disaster recovery replication, see Disaster recovery.

The high availability and disaster recovery features can be configured simultaneously allowing for disaster recovery replication to be configured on volume groups within a highly available storage partition. This configuration allows for high availability between two production systems, with replication to a third system for disaster recovery. For more information, see High availability and disaster recovery (3-site replication).

Storage partitions can be migrated nondisruptively between systems. Highly available storage partitions cannot be migrated as data access is only permitted between two systems at any time. For more information about migrating storage partitions, see Migrating storage partitions between systems.