SFHA Solutions 6.2 (AIX and Solaris): SmartIO: support for caching on SSD

Introduced in Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions (SFHA) 6.1 on Linux, the SmartIO feature is now available on AIX and Solaris in the SFHA 6.2 release.

SmartIO enables the effective use of your solid-state drives through data caching. SmartIO improves application performance by caching frequently accessed data, which maximizes the number of application Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) that can be performed. SmartIO reduces the number of I/Os that must be sent to the back-end storage, which frees up back-end storage resources and improves overall throughput. SmartIO supports read and writeback caching for Veritas File System (VxFS) file systems mounted on Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) volumes, in several caching modes and configurations. SmartIO also supports block-level read caching for applications running on VxVM volumes.

For more information on the SmartIO caching modes and configurations, see:

    Read caching for applications running on VxVM volumes
    Read caching for applications running on VxFS file systems
    Writeback caching for applications running on VxFS file systems
    Caching for databases running on VxFS file systems
    Caching for databases running on VxVM volumes

To use SmartIO, you set up a cache area on the target device. You can do this task simply with one command, while the application is online.

SmartIO leverages SFHA Solutions' knowledge of the workload characteristics to determine what data is cached and how that data gets removed from the cache. You can also add advisory information, to customize which data is cached.

For information about administering SmartIO, see the
Symantec™ Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions SmartIO for Solid State Drives Solutions Guide.

The following describe key administrative tasks for the SmartIO feature:

    Creating a cache area
    Displaying information about a cache area
    Enabling or disabling caching for a data object
    Pausing caching from a volume to a cache area
    Setting or changing the caching mode
    Flushing dirty data from a writeback cache area
    Viewing the SmartIO cache statistics

For more information on SmartIO, see the following Symantec Connect articles:

SmartIO Read caching demo

sfcache demo - VxVM caching

The SmartAssist tool is available for Solaris and Linux to assess the optimal size of the SmartIO cache for your environment.
https://sort.symantec.com/data_collectors