About Disk Volumes; About Volume Management Software - Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V445 Server Administration Manual

About Disk Volumes

Disk volumes are logical disk devices comprising one or more physical disks or
partitions from several different disks.
Once you create a volume, the OS uses and maintains the volume as if it were a
single disk. By providing this logical volume management layer, the software
overcomes the restrictions imposed by physical disk devices.
Sun's volume management products also provide RAID data redundancy and
performance features. RAID is a technology that helps protect against disk and
hardware failures. Through RAID technology, volume management software is able
to provide high data availability
administration.

About Volume Management Software

Volume management software lets you create disk volumes. Sun Microsystems offers
two different volume management applications for use on the Sun Fire V445 server:
Solaris Volume Manager software
VERITAS Volume Manager software
Sun's volume management applications offer the following features:
Support for several types of RAID configurations, which provide varying degrees
of availability, capacity, and performance
Hot-spare facilities, which provide for automatic data recovery when disks fail
Performance analysis tools, which enable you to monitor I/O performance and
isolate bottlenecks
A graphical user interface (GUI), which simplifies storage management
Support for online resizing, which enables volumes and their file systems to grow
and shrink online
Online reconfiguration facilities, which let you change to a different RAID
configuration or modify characteristics of an existing configuration
118 Sun Fire V445 Server Administration Guide • September 2007
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excellent I/O performance, and simplified