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About Intelligent Storage Provisioning

Intelligent Storage Provisioning (ISP) allows you to organize and manage your physical storage by creating virtual storage devices, as application volumes. You can use such volumes in the same way as traditional volumes in Veritas^TM Volume Manager (VxVM) by Symantec.

ISP creates application volumes from available storage with the capabilities you specify. It selects storage by consulting the externally-defined rule base for creating volumes, and compares this with the properties of the storage that is available.

ISP provides the following functionality:

• Creation and removal of application volumes.
• Organizing storage by grouping into storage pools.
• Resizing a volume while it is online.
• Moving or evacuating subdisks of a volume.
• Adding mirrors and columns to a volume while it is online.
• Removing mirrors and columns from a volume while it is online.
• Relocating a subdisk of a volume while it is online.
• Changing the capabilities of a volume while it is online.
• Creating volume snapshots using software or hardware.
• Reallocation of storage to preserve the capabilities of a volume.

ISP is capable of understanding Storage Area Network (SAN) topology and of efficiently using the available intelligent storage.

ISP interacts with other Veritas components, where these are available, such as the Veritas Array Integration Layer (VAIL) and the SAN Access Layer (SAL), to take appropriate actions when configuring intelligent storage in a SAN environment.

See About ISP and the SAN Access Layer.

Products and features such as dynamic multipathing (DMP), mirroring, RAID-5, SAL, snapshots, VAIL and Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR) require licenses in addition to the base license.

This book describes the command-line interface to ISP, and the language that is used for writing new rules, capabilities and templates. For a description of the graphical interface to ISP that is provided by the VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VEA), see the VERITAS Enterprise Administrator User's Guide and VEA online help.

For more information about how you can apply ISP in different scenarios such as implementing storage tiers, offhost processing, or remote mirroring between different locations, see the Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning Solutions Guide.