SCO UnixWare 2.1 Technical Summary - Bandwidthco Computer ...

An SCO Technical White Paper Version 2.1.2
The Volume Manager (VXVM) builds virtual disk volumes on top standard SCO UnixWare file
systems so that they span multiple disks or multiple slices. After creating a volume, the Volume
Manager operates on the virtual disk volumes, rather than the physical device. This provides
greater flexibility to administrators who need dynamic control of disk resources. VxVM permits
transparent and dynamic reorganization of the virtual disk volumes. This reorganization allows
administrators to optimize performance, change volume size, add mirrors, perform backups or
other administrative tasks without interrupting system users. The Volume Manager provides:
• Disk striping (RAID 0) - increases file system performance by distributing files and file
systems across different disks, allowing portions to be read and written in parallel, as
opposed to being done serially.
• Disk mirroring (RAID 1) - the ability for a second to take over if the primary fails.
• Disk striping with distributed parity (RAID 5) - provides ability to re-generate data on
failed drives using multiple “parity” disks rather than having to mirror all drives in question.
Parity information kept on parity drives is used o reconstruct the data lost from a disk going
off-line.
• Volume resizing - grow and shrink file systems in real time.
• Hot sparing allows administrators to designate a disk drive as a spare so that if a mirrored
drive goes down, ODM will rebuild the mirror onto to the designated spare. This reduces the
likelihood of critical data being lost due to a lack of mirroring.
• Disk defragmentation - performed on-line and transparent to users and applications.
• Staged I/O - provides a more efficient method of routing storage management requests
through the SCO UnixWare kernel, thus improving system performance and I/O throughput.
The Veritas Visual Administrator (VxVA) is a graphical system management tool used to
display, organize and optimize disk usage, and guard against media failure. The VxVA
application is based on the Motif graphical user interface. To make the job of the system
administrator easier, VxVA displays an icon-based interface for the manipulation of system
resources. By implementing the use of color, monitoring capabilities, and user-definable default
settings, VxVA provides an efficient environment for day-to-day disk administration. VxVA works
together with VxVM to help manipulate entries defined by the Volume Manager. VxVA displays
both physical and logical disk resources, providing the administrator a consolidated view of the
storage management subsystem. The true power of this tool is in the using. Few enterprise
customers who see the capabilities Online Data Manager fail to purchase it.
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