Volume protection

Volume protection prevents active volumes or host mappings from being deleted inadvertently if the system detects recent I/O activity.

This global setting is enabled by default on new systems. You can either set this value to apply to all volumes that are configured on your system, or control whether the system-level volume protection is enabled or disabled on specific pools. To prevent an active volume from being deleted unintentionally, administrators can use the system-wide setting to enable volume protection. They can also specify a time period that the volume must be idle before it can be deleted. If volume protection is enabled and the time period is not expired, the volume deletion fails even if the -force parameter is used.

The system-wide volume protection and the pool-level protection must both be enabled for protection to be active on a pool. The pool-level protection depends on the system-level setting to ensure that protection is applied consistently for volumes within that pool. If system-level protection is enabled, but pool-level protection is not enabled, any volumes in the pool can be deleted even when the setting is configured at the system level.

When you delete a volume, the system verifies whether it is a part of a host mapping or FlashCopy® mapping. For a volume that contains these dependencies, the volume cannot be deleted, unless the -force parameter is specified on the corresponding remove commands. However, the -force parameter does not delete a volume if it has recent I/O activity and volume protection is enabled. The -force parameter overrides the volume dependencies, not the volume protection setting.