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Concepts

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  • Volumes in the storage array
    Volumes are data containers that manage and organize the storage space on your storage array. Volumes are created from the storage capacity available on your storage array and make it easy to organize and use your system’s resources. This concept is similar to using folders/directories on a computer to organize files for easy and quick access.
  • Volume terminology
    Learn how the volume terms apply to your storage array.
  • Workflow for creating volumes
    In ThinkSystem System Manager , you can create volumes by following these steps.
  • Data integrity and data security for volumes
    You can enable volumes to use the Data Assurance (DA) feature and the Drive Security feature. These features are presented at the pool and volume group level in System Manager .
  • SSD Cache and volumes
    You can add a volume to SSD Cache as a way to improve read-only performance. SSD Cache consists of a set of solid-state disk (SSD) drives that you logically group together in your storage array.
  • Application-specific workloads
    A workload is a storage object that supports an application. You can define one or more workloads, or instances, per application. For some applications, System Manager configures the workload to contain volumes with similar underlying volume characteristics. These volume characteristics are optimized based on the type of application the workload supports. For example, if you create a workload that supports a Microsoft SQL Server application and then subsequently create volumes for that workload, the underlying volume characteristics are optimized to support Microsoft SQL Server.
  • Actions you can perform on volumes
    You can perform a number of different actions on a volume: increasing capacity, deleting, copying, initializing, redistributing, changing ownership, changing cache settings, and changing media scan settings.
  • Capacity for volumes
    The drives in your storage array provide the physical storage capacity for your data. Before you can begin storing data, you must configure the allocated capacity into logical components known as pools or volume groups. You use these storage objects to configure, store, maintain, and preserve data on your storage array.
  • Thin volume monitoring
    You can monitor thin volumes for space and generate appropriate alerts to prevent out-of-capacity conditions.
  • Comparison between thick volumes and thin volumes
    A thick volume is always fully-provisioned, which means that all of the capacity is allocated when the volume is created. A thin volume is always thinly-provisioned, which means that the capacity is allocated as the data is being written to the volume.
  • Copy Volume function
    The Copy Volume function enables you to create a point-in-time copy of a volume by creating two separate volumes, the source volume and the target volume, on the same storage array. This function performs a byte-by-byte copy from the source volume to the target volume, making the data on the target volume identical to the data on the source volume.
  • Types of Copy Volume operations
    You can perform either an offline Copy Volume operation or an online Copy Volume operation. An offline operation reads data from a source volume and copies it to a target volume. An online operation uses a snapshot volume as the source and copies its data to a target volume.