HP VMA-series Memory Arrays - Manual (Page 19)

AM456-9007B Rev 02 HP VMA SAN Gateway Installation and User Guide 19
provided on the HP VMA SAN Gateways and VMA Arrays to enable the
systems to be configured and monitored as a single system. SNMP and call-
home e-mail alerts are sent in the event of hardware failures or other critical
events.
The internal architecture of the vSHARE system is designed for minimum latency
and multipathing the HP VMA SAN Gateway and the VMA Arrays to improve
availability. This Intelligent Flash Storage architecture eliminates the software
required for cache control, RAID control and flash memory control and replaces
them with flash memory optimized architectures, which provide data protection
and high performance. Latency is reduced by implementing many of the data path
functions in hardware.
A vSHARE system typically consists of one or more HP VMA SAN Gateways
running the vSHARE software and one or more VMA Arrays.
In this environment, the HP VMA SAN Gateways are targets, and the hosts (for
example, a database server or application server) are the initiators. The storage
systems have storage target devices, LUNs, which the hosts access through the HP
VMA SAN Gateways. The LUNs are part of large storage arrays and they can be
allocated and provisioned as they are needed.
vSHARE Feature Summary
vSHARE runs as software on the HP VMA SAN Gateway managing SAN block
storage and providing high performance processing, high bandwidth DRAM, and
high bandwidth access to the VMA Arrays.
Each vSHARE HP VMA SAN Gateway operates as a SAN (Fibre Channel), and
provides access to LUNs that are stored on its attached VMA Arrays.
Note: HP VMA-series SAN Gateway supports only SAN (Fibre Channel)
connectivity
The LUN management capability of the vSHARE software is very feature rich and
has many patent-pending capabilities. Four of the most important features are
flexible LUN mapping, full-speed LUNs, shared LUNs, and scale-out clustering:
• Flexible LUN Mapping: The vSHARE software formats each VMA Array
into a container of usable address space. Each container is then split into 1GB
flashlets. Up to 1024 LUNs can be created on each array with each assigned