All operating system, application, and data storage in the MtXia environment shall be configured external to the system. The purpose of this is to increase the recoverability of the system, reduce hardware related outages, and to centralize the management of storage.
All systems will have multiple hardware paths to the storage, those paths may be physical or virtual.
Multiple volume groups shall be created in the AIX environment. The operating system volume group, called "rootvg", will contain only operating system related applications and files. The "rootvg" will contain a minimum amount of storage.
The standard "rootvg" will contain a single 9 GB disk that exists on the SAN and is mirrored by the SAN environment. Multiple paths to the "rootvg" disk are configured using IBM's Multi-Path I/O (MPIO) device driver. Optionally, the "rootvg" may have an "alt_disk" that exists on internal storage. The "alt_disk" is used to perform Operating System updates.
All non-operating system related programs and data will be stored in volume groups other than "rootvg". The Volume group names will be created in accordance with MtXia's VG naming standards and will contain storage as required by the supported business function.
All non-rootvg volume groups residing on Hitachi SAN based storage will utilize the latest HDLM driver and multiple hardware paths to the SAN. The HDLM driver is updated on a regular basis.
Further information regarding MtXia's storage standards can be obtained from the following document: Unix-Storage-Presentation.pdf