Visara VI-5990 - Manual (Page 7)

VI-5990 Installation and Configuration Manual
707166-001 1-1
Chapter 1. VI-5990 Installation
The purpose of this manual is to document the VI-5990A Virtual Tape Appliance and
VI-5990L Virtual Tape Library, providing specifics and procedures related to the
installation and configuration of these products.
VI-5990A Product Overview
The Visara VI-5990A Virtual Tape Appliance provides an interface between one or more
host mainframe systems and data storage, usually hard drive storage. It is called a Virtual
Tape Appliance because it appears to the host(s) as if it were one or more IBM 3490 or
IBM 3590 tape controllers. The VI-5990A may appear as if it were as many as sixteen
different tape controllers, with each tape controller having up to sixteen virtual tape
drives. Fully configured the VI-5990 may appear to have as many as 256 (virtual) tape
drives. Data storage used by the VI-5990A is external. Storage may be interfaced through
Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), Infiniband Adapters, or through Ethernet iSCSI. Two built in
10 Gbps Ethernet interfaces may be configured to be used with iSCSI.
The VI-5990A is housed in an enterprise class 3U server which may be installed in any
standard 19” rack, and comes with dual processors, dual redundant hot-swappable power
supplies, and two 10Gbps Ethernet interfaces. Each power supply is capable of
completely running the platform. A pair of hard drives, set up in a mirrored-RAID
configuration supports the Linux operating system and VI-5990 server software. Failure
of a single hard drive is permissible without interrupting the operation of the platform.
Five hot-swappable fans provide cooling.
Hardware monitoring of the power supplies, hard drives, fans, and cooling can be viewed
through a browser connection. Optionally you may configure the VI-5990A to generate
emails to warn of the same hardware failures if they were to occur.
Configuration and management of the platform is performed through a secure browser
connection (HTTPS), through either a locally-attached console (directly attached
keyboard, mouse, and monitor), or remotely through an Ethernet connection. The
VI-5990A ships with a default configuration including a default IP address.
Once configured, the VI-5990A is capable of running independently, without human
intervention. That is, if power is lost and regained, it will automatically boot back into
service using the stored configuration. You can manage the platform using the same
secure web browser connection from anywhere. Multiple management console interfaces
are supported by the VI-5990A.