HP VMA-series Memory Arrays - Manual (Page 20)

20 AM456-9007B Rev 02 HP VMA SAN Gateway Installation and User Guide
any number of flashlets. There is no need for flashlets to be contiguous and
hence LUNs can be packed very well with no wasted space.
• Full-Speed LUNs: Each flashlet and hence each LUN is striped across all of
the VIMMs in a flash VMA Array. By doing this, the performance of the
LUN is only limited by the performance of the whole VMA Array.
• Shared LUNs: Each LUN can be accessed using Fibre Channel and can be
shared by many servers in a cluster.
• Scale-out Clustering: vSHARE leverages the rich clustering capabilities of
vCLUSTER to provide a single web, SNMP, e-mail and XML provisioning
and management API on a system that can scale to 2.5PB, 16,000 LUNs and
10M IOPS. Flash VMA Arrays can be added dynamically without
interruption of existing LUNs and users.
• Active-Active High Availability (HA) configuration: vSHARE provides the
ability to have dual redundant HP VMA SAN Gateways servicing I/O
requests for attached VMA Arrays. For best performance, the configuration
requires that client initiators use multipath I/O (MPIO) software with a round-
robin scheduling algorithm.
LUNs are accessible in an active-active configuration via either HP VMA SAN
Gateway in an HA pair. Clients using MPIO can continue I/O through either
HP VMA SAN Gateway as long as at least one path is still available.
vCLUSTER Architecture
A typical HP VMA SAN Gateway cluster consists of one or more HP VMA SAN
Gateways (nodes), one of which is designated as the master node, another is
designated as the standby node, and additional nodes are designated as “normal”
nodes.
The HP VMA SAN Gateways provide connectivity to the network and allow
multiple servers to share the high performance flash VMA Arrays. Depending on
the configuration, HP VMA SAN Gateways may be used for block or file storage.
The VMA Arrays provide high capacity flash storage with RAID protection.
In an HP VMA SAN Gateway cluster the first HP VMA SAN Gateway added to
the cluster is designated as the Master HP VMA SAN Gateway (master node).
Configurations defined in the master node are inherited by every other node in the
cluster. Should the master node fail, the standby node takes over the master role,
and cluster management traffic is automatically redirected to the new master node.