Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication for Open Systems

Chapter 5. Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication with SAN Volume Controller and Storwize family 283

5.2 SAN Volume Controller

The SAN Volume Controller’s primary function is to act as a gateway, which provides a

common virtualization layer to other storage systems, such as DS8870, XIV, and supported

storage systems from other vendors (see Figure 5-1). Among other features, SAN Volume

Controller provides a common set of Advanced Copy Services functions that can be used

across all its managed storage systems, whether homogeneous or heterogeneous.

Figure 5-1 SAN Volume Controller conceptual and topology overview

SAN Volume Controller was designed under project COMmodity PArts Storage System or

COMPASS with the goal of using, as many as possible, off-the-shelf standard components.

Its hardware is based on IBM xSeries® 1U rack servers. The most recently released

hardware node, the 2145-CG8, is based on IBM System x3550 M3 server technology with an

Intel Xeon 5500 2.53 GHz quad-core processor, 24 GB of cache, four 8 Gbps Fibre Channel

ports, and two 1 GbE ports, as shown in Figure 5-2.

Figure 5-2 One pair of SAN Volume Controller 2145-CG8 nodes

The SAN Volume Controller node model CG8 now offers a FlashCopy ports expansion option

that gives you four more FlashCopy ports per node. By using this expansion option, some of

these other ports can be configured as dedicated to remote copy services connections.