powerpath fundamentals - srg.pdf

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Revision Date: April, 2013 Revision Number: MR-1WP-PWRPFD_2.0.

1 PowerPath Fundamentals


The objectives for this course are presented here. Please take a moment to review them.

PowerPath Fundamentals 2


The objectives for this module are shown here. Please take a moment to review them.

PowerPath Fundamentals 3


PowerPath has traditionally been viewed only as path management software supporting load balancing and failover. With the addition of migration and encryption functionality, PowerPath has expanded its scope of functionality as well as its supported platforms. Centralized licensing platforms as well as standardized interfaces allow for the bundling of PowerPath Products together.

PowerPath should now be viewed as a family of technology having two distinct functions. Two Products support the core function of Path Management and Optimization, while the other two products perform a Data Protection function:

PowerPath Multipathing, sometimes referred to simply as PowerPath, is the same trusted product it has always been. The product automates data path management and failover and recovery, as well as optimizes load balancing to ensure application availability and performance. PowerPath Multipathing runs on Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux.

PowerPath/VE automates and optimizes data path pools in virtual environments such as VMware to ensure business process availability and performance and the ability to scale-out mission-critical applications.

PowerPath Migration Enabler leverages the same underlying technology as PowerPath Multipathing to enable data mobility technologies to perform data migrations to and from any network or supported array type. This includes EMC and qualified non-EMC storage. The product allows completion of these tasks without application downtime.

PowerPath Encryption, sometimes also called VNX Host Encryption, uses software agents on hosts and centralized RSA Data Protection Manager appliances for key management to secure data from the host to disk on storage.



Here is a list of the main business challenges that IT professionals face today.

Customers need their businesses up and running 24x7 in order to protect revenue streams, support new product development efforts, and increase customer satisfaction.

Businesses need a method to manage their storage in order to maximize their technology investments. IT professionals are searching for new and more efficient, policy-based, automated management tools to manage and reduce the complexity of their environment. Tools must be capable of tuning the environment in order to maximize server, storage, and data path utilization.

These management tools must have the ability to quickly respond to various and changing business requirements, provide continuous data protection, and tune the I/O streams of concurrently running applications. These requirements are even more demanding as physical hosts are redeployed as virtual hosts on enterprise virtual server environments such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.



Now that business challenges, PowerPath can help to solve these problems. PowerPath can automatically tune host-to-storage connections when it detects imbalances. It does this by selecting alternate paths for the data to be routed through. It also enhances multi-path I/O capability in the SAN using automatic I/O load balancing and online path failover functionality. These features are combined into one integrated package known as PowerPath Multipathing, or simply PowerPath.

automatic load balancing functionality guarantees maximum use of multiple paths to the data. Critical server and array resources, such as memory and processing power, are not limited to using congested paths to the data while other paths to that same data are under utilized. By maximizing the use of multiple data paths, server and array investments are better allowed to be used to their full potential.

automatic path fail-over capability guarantees application availability. When the host and storage environment are configured with redundant paths through multiple HBAs and SAN fabrics, PowerPath automatically uses alternate paths to the device and continues to balance I/O load across the remaining paths. When a path is restored, PowerPath automatically adds the path back into the available paths list and puts it back into use for load balancing.

When using PowerPath, all load balancing and failover policies are tunable without interrupting application operations. Path management policies may be customized on the host at the array level or on a device by device basis as required.



PowerPath can add value in many ways. For example, it is supported on many operating system platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX and supports all EMC arrays and several non-EMC arrays (referred to as third-party arrays).

PowerPath helps maximize SAN performance by using all the I/O processing and bus capacity of all available paths to a device. Load balancing is administered on a host-by-host basis and works by equalizing I/O load across all paths to the array from the host. PowerPath decisively handles each I/O request by first checking current load balancing and path failover settings to understand how to select the least-burdened available path.

PowerPath reduces management time and application downtime, because administrators no longer need to maintain and configure paths statically across logical devices. With PowerPath, no setup time is required, and paths are always configured for optimum performance.

If there is a failure in the data path, PowerPath fails over the I/O to an alternative path. PowerPath determines the best and most efficient way to access devices and paths to them across the SAN.



These are the key points covered in this module. Please take a moment to review them.


powerpath fundamentals - srg.pdf

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