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ESS Subsystem Device Driver setup

In a high availability environment, there is a special device driver, designed for ESS, named Subsystem Device Driver (SDD). This device driver allows for redundant links and load sharing for storage traffic when multiple fiber connections exist between nodes and the ESS storage subsystem.


SDD comes as an AIX installable fileset, named ibm2105.rte. This has to be installed on all cluster nodes, even if not all nodes in the cluster have more than one FC adapter.

In our configuration, since each node is connected to the ESS using two optical cables, each disk can be accessed via any of the two paths. When SDD is installed, a virtual path is created. This virtual path represents the same storage space, but is accessible via both fiber links.

There are two versions of the SDD driver for AIX:

ibmSdd_510.rte - This is suitable for non-HACMP configurations or for concurrent HACMP (HACMP/ESCRM).

ibmSdd_510nchamp.rte - This has to be used in nonconcurrent HACMP environments.

In our environment, we are using HACMP, but not with concurrent disk access (locking is provided by GPFS and Oracle), thus we installed ibmSdd_510nchamp.rte.

See Appendix A, Operating system fileset levels for more details on the fileset names and releases.

The latest SAN software can be downloaded from:

http://ssddom02.storage.ibm.com/techsup/webnav.nsf/support/2105

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