UNSOLVED
- OK, what you are looking for is clearer now. But even the HP MPIO DSM is still specific for HP devices. You need the specific DSM for a EVA array, MSA array, EVA 3000/5000 array etc. The MPIO soutions from storage vendors are going to be specific to the uniqueness of their hardware (active/active controllers etc..) so I don't think you are going to find a generic storage MPIO solution for attaching to multiple vendor storage arrays.
That being said, PowerPath does have a "Generic" setting that while reducing functionality or performance on EMC arrays may enable you to attach to arrays from different vendors simultaneously. I am not sure about this, but may help your situation. - Yes, I see vendors like HP have developed the HP MPIO DSM for their EVA, which gives a user the option to not use their multi-path software SecurePath.
What I am trying to accomplish is to have a common driver that I could use if I wanted to attach multiple vendor storage to 1 host. I'm not sure that is possible.
Thanks. In direct answer to the origonal question
The Clariion does support MPIO depending on your specific Flare code level on the Clariion.
The Clariion is an active-passive array - meaning that IO is only normally serviced to a device on either SPA or SPB.
However in recent versions of Flare code there is a failover setting of 4 (ALUA) which basically makes the Clariion behave like an active-active array.
MPIO does not understand active-passive arrays and to use MPIO you need the above setting.
Please note that MPIO does not supply the load balancing algorithms that PowerPath supplies.
As far as PowerPath conecting to EMC and non-EMC arrays is concerned - PowerPath is modular in nature and with PowerPath 5.3 you can have full functionality when connected to an EMC array and the functionality we provide to 3rd party arrays (ie the generic). Please note this is only supported with 3rd party arrays specified in the PowerPath release notes.
Hello,
There is an article I came accross in powerlink which details the Active/Active feature.
The document is called EMC Clariion Asymmetric Active/Active Feature, do a search for the doc and restrict the search to white papers.
I hope this helps,
Regards,
Nollaig
AranH1
2163 Posts
1031
0
Posted May 25th, 2007 09:00
You definitely want to use PowerPath for multipath instead of developing your own solution.