The SmartIO feature on Linux was introduced in Storage Foundation and High Availability (SFHA) 6.1. Beginning in this release, SmartIO is also supported on AIX and Solaris. SmartIO enables data efficiency on your solid state drives (SSDs) through I/O caching.
For information about administering SmartIO, see the Symantec Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions SmartIO for Solid State Drives Solutions....
In an SFHA environment, applications can failover to another node. On AIX, Linux, and Solaris, beginning in this release, the SFCache agent allows you to enable caching for an application if there are caching devices. The SFCache agent also allows you to failover the application to a node that does not have caching devices.
The SFCache agent monitors:
- Read caching for Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) cache
- Read and writeback caching for Veritas File System (VxFS) cache
For volume-level caching, the cache objects are disk groups and volumes. For file system level caching, the cache object is the mount point. You can:
- Modify the caching mode at runtime
- Set the default caching mode when you mount the VxFS file system
- Configure the MountOpt attribute of the Mount agent to specify the default caching mode using the smartiomode option
For more information about the smartiomode option, see the mount_vxfs(1m) manual page.
If the cache faults, the application still runs without any issues on the same system, but with degraded I/O performance. You can configure the SFCache agent’s CacheFaultPolicy attribute and choose to either ignore or initiate failover.
If SmartIO is not enabled on a node, the SFCache resource acts as a dummy resource and is reported as ONLINE or OFFLINE depending on the group state, but caching-related operations are not performed.
For more information, see:
Symantec Storage Foundation and High Availability documentation for other releases and platforms can be found on the SORT website.
