EMC

EMC Corporation

EMC Corporation , a Financial Times Global 500, Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company, develops, delivers and supports information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure hardware, software, and services. EMC is headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, USA.Former Intel executive Richard Egan and his...

 Invista is a software product, first introduced in 2005, which provides a storage virtualization

Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization or storage virtualisation is a concept and term used within computer science. Specifically, storage systems may use virtualization concepts as a tool to enable better functionality and more advanced features within the storage system.Broadly speaking, a 'storage system' is...

 solution that runs on "intelligent" storage area network

Storage area network

A storage area network is a dedicated network that provides access to consolidated, block level data storage. SANs are primarily used to make storage devices, such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes, accessible to servers so that the devices appear like locally attached devices...

 switches (i.e. selected models of Cisco

Cisco

Cisco may refer to:Companies:*Cisco Systems, a computer networking company* Certis CISCO, corporatised entity of the former Commercial and Industrial Security Corporation in Singapore...

 or Brocade

Brocade Communications Systems

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. , based in Silicon Valley , is a vendor of storage area network hardware and software. The company also designs, manufactures, and sells networking products and management applications for local, metro, and wide area networks...

 switches). Main feature of Invista is dynamic seamless data migration between two storage devices. Additionally it features dynamic volume management

Logical volume management

In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes...

, cloning and snapshot

Snapshot (computer storage)

In computer systems, a snapshot is the state of a system at a particular point in time. The term was coined as an analogy to that in photography. It can refer to an actual copy of the state of a system or to a capability provided by certain systems....

s.

Invista relies on Split-Path Architecture (SPA) to manage data flows. The intelligent switch redirects all control commands

SCSI command

In SCSI computer storage, a command is the basic unit of communication. The SCSI command architecture was originally defined for parallel SCSI buses but has been carried forward with minimal change for use with Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Serial Attached SCSI....

 (e.g. SCSI Inquiry, Read Capacity, or Report LUNs) to a pair of redundant external controllers called Control Path Cluster (CPC), while the stream of I/O transactions

Input/output

In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...

 flows directly from the host to the appropriate physical storage array

Disk array

A disk array is a disk storage system which contains multiple disk drives. It is differentiated from a disk enclosure, in that an array has cache memory and advanced functionality, like RAID and virtualization.Components of a typical disk array include:...

 via the intelligent switch hardware. In the current release, CPC and the switch communicate using SNMP

Simple Network Management Protocol

Simple Network Management Protocol is an "Internet-standard protocol for managing devices on IP networks. Devices that typically support SNMP include routers, switches, servers, workstations, printers, modem racks, and more." It is used mostly in network management systems to monitor...

 over an Ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

 connection. Further versions might allow in-band Fibre Channel

Fibre Channel

Fibre Channel, or FC, is a gigabit-speed network technology primarily used for storage networking. Fibre Channel is standardized in the T11 Technical Committee of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards , an American National Standards Institute –accredited standards...

 communication.

Invista can be configured in a redundant and highly available

High availability

High availability is a system design approach and associated service implementation that ensures a prearranged level of operational performance will be met during a contractual measurement period....

 fashion so it contains no single point of failure

Single point of failure

A single point of failure is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. They are undesirable in any system with a goal of high availability or reliability, be it a business practice, software application, or other industrial system.-Overview:Systems can be made...

.

Invista's management tool is a Java-based GUI

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 called Invista Element Manager (a CLI is also available).

See also

• IBM SAN Volume Controller
  IBM SAN Volume Controller
  In computer data storage, the IBM SAN Volume Controller is a block storage virtualization appliance that belongs to the IBM System Storage product family. SVC implements an indirection, or "virtualization", layer in a Fibre Channel storage area network .- Architecture :SVC is always deployed as a...
  
  (SVC)
• EMC Storage Product Knowledge Sharing