HP StorageWorks 8000 - NAS Installation guide

HP Surestore NAS 8000 High Availability Solution Integration Manual (SIM) 1
HP Surestore NAS 8000
High Availability Solution
Integration Manual (SIM)
Read Me First
This binder includes the details of the integration tasks that Hewlett-Packard or an authorized
reseller has performed. The first section, Solution Integration and Product Configuration
Overview, is intended to give you a detailed picture of the solution you ordered from Hewlett
Packard.
The remaining sections of this binder will be used by your installation specialist, who will work
with you to plan and install your HP Network Attached Storage (NAS) 8000 High Availability
(HA) system according to your specific requirements.
Before installing the HP NAS 8000 HA solution, you must first complete the items in the
“Network and Storage Planning” section of this binder. If your installation specialist has not
done so already, he or she will contact you to schedule a joint planning session.
After the planning is complete, your installation specialist will perform tasks specified in this
binder’s “Installation Guide” section.
We sincerely hope that you will be delighted with our integration services and we are looking
forward to hearing from you.
Format Conventions
WARNING Identifies a hazard that can cause personal injury
Caution Identifies a hazard that can cause hardware or software damage
Note Identifies significant concepts or operating instructions
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2 HP Surestore NAS 8000 High Availability Solution Integration Manual (SIM)
Binder Contents
This binder contains the following sections:
Notice
© Hewlett-Packard Company, 2002. All rights reserved.
Hewlett-Packard Company makes no warranty of any kind with regard to this material,
including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a
particular purpose. Hewlett-Packard shall not be liable for errors contained herein or for
incidental or consequential damages in connection with the furnishing, performance, or use of
this material.
This document contains proprietary information, which is protected by copyright. No part of
this document may be photocopied, reproduced, or translated into another language without
the prior written consent of Hewlett-Packard. The information contained in this document is
subject to change without notice.
Trademark Information
Java and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems,
Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.
Microsoft, Windows, and Windows NT are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft
Corporation.
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
Section Audience Purpose
1. Read Me First Customer IT administrator Introduction
2. Solution Integration and
Product Configuration
Overview
Customer IT administrator Product information
3. Network and Storage
Planning
Installation specialist and
customer IT administrator
Pre-installation planning
session
4. Installation Guide Installation specialist Hardware installation and
software configuration
5. Safety Installation specialist and
customer IT administrator
Warnings and regulatory
information
6. Warranty and Support Customer IT administrator Warranty and technical
support contracts

Solution Integration and Product Configuration Overview 3
Solution Integration and
Product Configuration Overview
This section contains the following documents, which were customized and inserted by the
Integration Center:
■Deployment information
■Rack, server and component configurations
■Parts list
■Network, cabling, and power connection diagrams
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4 Solution Integration and Product Configuration Overview

Network and Storage Planning 5
Network and Storage Planning
This section contains pre-planning materials that the installation specialist can review with the
customer before the NAS 8000 system arrives onsite. It includes:
■System overview: a conceptual overview of the storage system of the HP NAS 8000 HA,
including:
—Storage Overview and Terminology
—HA Storage Configuration
■Planning worksheets to record the required network and storage settings for the NAS 8000
HA system. The information in the planning worksheets is required to install and configure
the system:
—Calculating Available Disk Space
—Storage Planning
—High Availability Planning
—Network Planning
You need to construct an overall storage architecture by:
1. Determining the amount of total storage available
2. Deciding how to allocate it to different groups or functions
Storage space is spread across volume groups. In these volume groups, file volumes divide the
disk space. It is important to plan storage space prior to creating file volumes. Although the HP
NAS 8000 HA lets you expand volume groups later, you may want to reserve extra space
during setup to allow for the use of snapshots. For more information, see “Snapshots” on
page 7.
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6 Network and Storage Planning
Storage Overview and Terminology
The HP NAS 8000 HA is an easy-to-manage storage solution for heterogeneous environments
including Windows, UNIX, and Linux.
The storage space on the HP NAS 8000 HA is made up of physical and logical storage:
■Physical storage refers to the hardware used for data storage.
■Logical storage is created by software that organizes your physical storage into file
volumes and directories.
In addition, the HA configurations include high-availability features such as redundant
hardware and failover packages.
Work with the customer to construct an overall storage architecture determining the total
amount of storage available and how it should be allocated to different groups or functions.
Data protection, including two RAID levels and active spare settings, should also be
considered.
Physical Storage
The HP NAS 8000 Direct Attach solutions use either the HP Virtual Array 7100 or the HP
Virtual Array 7400 series high-performance, high-availability, multi-terabyte storage arrays.
One- and two-array configurations are supported.
Logical Storage
Virtual Array
The term “Virtual Array” refers to the way the disks within the array are treated as a pool of
data storage blocks instead of real physical disks.
Because data is spread across all of the disks in the array, logical-to-physical data maps keep
track of where the data is physically located on the disks in the array. These maps are stored in
array controller cache memory. The host has no visibility of the cache data maps; it is simply
presented with logical units (LUNs) for data storage operations.
Logical Unit Number
A logical unit number (LUN) is a logical aggregation of space on physical drives. LUNs are
unique identifiers that enable the controller to differentiate between separate devices (each of
which is a logical unit). Each LUN is a unique number that identifies a specific unit of storage.
The HP NAS 8000 HA supports up to 127 LUNs in single-array direct-attach configurations
and up to 31 LUNs in FC-attach multiple-array configurations.
Volume Groups
A volume group is the aggregation of one or more LUNs. Volume groups combine the space
from LUNs and make the space accessible to the file system for creating file volumes and
directories, which can then be made accessible to users.
File Volumes
A volume group is divided into one or more file volumes. File volumes are the basic unit of
logical storage for a file system on the HP NAS 8000 HA. File volumes can be further
subdivided into individual directories.

Network and Storage Planning 7
Directories
Directories let you organize information. Directories contain files or other persistent data
structures in a file system that contains information about other files. Directories are usually
organized hierarchically and may contain both files and other directories, and are used to
organize collections of files for applications or convenience.
Snapshots
Snapshots are an important part of data-protection plans. A good data-protection plan should
include a backup strategy, storage redundancy provided by RAID levels, and snapshots.
Snapshots provide nearly instantaneous access to previous versions of a file stored on the HP
NAS 8000 HA solution.
A snapshot is a read-only picture of a file volume at a specific point in time. When you create
a snapshot of a file volume, the snapshot initially consumes zero physical space. However, as
users modify the file volume, the snapshot tracks changes between the original file volume and
the modified file volume. If an error occurs and a user needs to revert to the previous version,
the snapshot version of the file can be restored.
Snapshots consume storage space. When planning storage, consider how dynamic your data
will be. With file volumes in which data changes rapidly, snapshots will consume a larger
amount of space. At the extreme limit, a file volume can change so much from the original
information that the snapshot consumes the same amount of space as the original data.
Typically, data does not change so rapidly, and the usage and growth of snapshot space is
relatively slow.
Snapshots are optional and may be created at any time after the basic storage configuration is
complete. Users can add or resize a snapshot at a later time if there is enough free space
available in the volume group.

8 Network and Storage Planning
High Availability
The HP NAS 8000 HA solution includes a cluster , or group, of two NAS servers that function as
a unified system. The cluster is managed by a Quorum server.
The main purpose of high-availability clusters is to provide a higher degree of storage
availability to client systems than is possible with a single server. This is accomplished by
eliminating single points of failure and providing functional redundancy. Uninterrupted service
is provided by failing over file serving capabilities (see “Failover Packages” on page 8) to a
secondary server in the event of a failure in the primary server in the cluster.
■The NAS servers provide failover services for each other.
■The Quorum server manages the NAS servers, or
cluster nodes , and provides cluster
arbitration services that prevent data corruption.
Clusters
HA Clusters provide a higher degree of storage availability than is possible with a single
server. This is provided by:
■Hardware component redundancy designed to eliminate single points of failure. Each
cluster consists of two or more NAS servers (nodes) plus one Quorum server.
■Software failover capabilities. All storage is controlled by packages which are the smallest
units of failover in the cluster.
Failover Packages
When a package failure is detected, the package is halted and will fail over to another node,
provided that an eligible adoptive node is present. Each package and its associated resources
are monitored independently. This allows failures that are limited to a single package to be
handled without affecting the state of other packages.
The NAS solution supports two failover models:
■Active/Active (or “Dual Active”) means that all cluster nodes can be serving data
simultaneously. The nodes will provide failover services for each other, but can be fully
utilized at all times. This mode is achieved by configuring failover packages to run on both
cluster nodes – effectively dividing the storage between the nodes.
■Active/Passive (or “Single Active”) means that one server is actively serving data while the
other node is in full-time stand-by mode, becoming active only when the other node fails.
This mode can be realized by configuring all of the failover packages and storage to run on
only one node. Without any packages to run, the other node will have nothing to do but
wait and monitor the other node for failure.

Network and Storage Planning 9
Data Protection
RAID Levels
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) technology uses different industry-standard
techniques for storing data and maintaining data redundancy. These techniques, called “RAID
levels,” define the method used for distributing data on the disks in a logical unit (LUN). The
storage arrays used in the HP NAS 8000 HA solution support the following RAID levels:
■RAID 1+0.
RAID 1+0.RAID 1+0.
RAID 1+0. RAID 1+0 provides data redundancy and good performance. However, the
performance is achieved by using a less efficient technique of storing redundant data called
“mirroring.” Mirroring maintains two sets of the data: a primary set and a backup set, or
“mirror”, of the primary set. Therefore, half of the disk space is consumed by redundant
data.
■AutoRAID
AutoRAIDAutoRAID
AutoRAID. AutoRAID is a combination of RAID 1+0 and 5DP (RAID 5 Double Parity).
RAID 5DP provides data redundancy and improves cost-efficiency by using a more efficient
method of storing redundant data. However, there is a performance penalty for each write
operation.
AutoRAID relieves you of many of the decisions regarding RAID levels and data location by
automatically selecting RAID 1+0 or RAID 5DP depending on the usage patterns of the
data. AutoRAID automatically manages your data for you, providing redundancy and high
performance with minimal involvement. This configuration eliminates the requirement for
the system administrator to understand and configure RAID levels.
For additional information on RAID settings, see your storage array user’s guide or search for
RAID levels at www.hp.com.
Active Spare
The active spare feature in the storage array offers increased protection against disk failure.
An active spare ensures that the array can restore data redundancy and performance as
quickly as possible following a hard disk failure.
An active spare reserves capacity to perform a rebuild in the event of a disk failure. If you are
using disks of different capacities in your array, active spare reserves enough space to rebuild
the largest disk. As with logical volumes, the capacity reserved for the active spare is
distributed across all the disks in the array; no one physical disk contains the active spare.
Active spare is similar to the dedicated hot spare disks used in some conventional arrays.
However, those arrays let the hot spare remain idle until it is needed. This array uses the active
spare for RAID 1+0 storage until the spare is needed. This provides the added benefit of
enhancing performance while also protecting against disk failure.

10 Network and Storage Planning
HA Storage Configuration
This section provides suggestions for configuring the storage on a NAS 8000 with
high availability features.
On a simple direct-attach NAS system without HA features, the simplest way to configure the
storage is to create a single LUN for the entire array and create one volume group with multiple
file volumes beneath it. However, in an HA cluster with two NAS Servers, each volume group
can be active on only one NAS server, or
node , at a time. Therefore, if you are using active/
active failover packages (see “Failover Packages” on page 8), you must create at least two
volume groups so each node can access some of your storage.
When determining how many LUNs and volume groups to create, consider the following:
■A volume group can be active on only one node at a time.
■A volume group can be assigned to only one failover package.
■File volumes can’t be split between packages or nodes.
■Multiple volume groups can be assigned to the same package.
■A package can only run on one node at a time.
■The HA cluster is limited to 30 packages total (both nodes combined).
■A package is the smallest unit of failover.
■A volume group is the smallest unit of storage that can be failed over.
■If a package contains multiple volume groups and a single volume group, file volume or
even share fails, the entire package will be failed over.
■More packages means a higher degree of granularity to balance the packages between the
nodes and detect failures.
■More packages also results in higher complexity in the cluster configuration and requires
more virtual IP addresses to keep track of.
■The packages should be divided between the cluster nodes such that the storage access
load (from client systems) will be balanced. This may or may not correspond to balanced
storage capacity between the nodes.
The illustrations on the following pages depict three common storage configurations:
■Single array with one LUN and one Volume Group for active/passive failover
configurations.
■Single array with multiple LUNs, volume groups and packages.
■Multiple arrays, LUNs, volume groups and packages.