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Disk Management Comes of Age

Independence. Relationships. Choices. Attraction. If you know any recent college grads, you know the importance of these words to those who are all grown up. They also happen to be hallmarks of the new disk management functions available in iSeries Navigator* at OS/400* V5R2.

iSeries Navigator disk management support began with V4R5. Prior to V5R2, when iSeries Navigator was known as Operations Navigator, the interface introduced the capability to configure, protect and maintain disk units and disk pools.

A few of the offerings with V5R2 include:

• Increased value available with independent disk pools
• Capability to form relationships with disk pool groups
• Opportunity to choose how you want to optimize your parity sets
• An attractive taskpad for quick access to disk management tasks

Disk Management Basics
To access the iSeries Navigator disk management functions in the Disk Units container of the interface, expand My Connections>any iSeries server>Configuration and Service>Hardware>Disk Units.

The New Disk Pool wizard, introduced with V4R5, has been enhanced for each release. The wizard guides you through creating a basic or independent disk pool, adding disk units to the disk pool, selecting the use of mirrored protection or device parity protection to protect the disk pool, and offers the option of starting compression for eligible disk units. (Note: Parity or data redundancy is also known as RAID.) To access the New Disk Pool wizard, right-click on "Disk Pools" and select "New Disk Pool." Figure 1 shows the final screen of the New Disk Pool. The columns show some of the protection, etc., that has been selected.

Once your disk pools are configured, you can manage your disk units and disk pools from start to finish. You can tweak your protection with start and stop mirroring, start and stop device parity protection, suspend and resume mirroring, and include or exclude disk units from a parity set. When it comes to disk-unit maintenance, you can do everything from install new disk units to remove a disk unit from a disk pool. You can also clear disk pools and perform recovery actions. These actions are accomplished by right-clicking on a disk unit or disk pool and selecting the desired action. Online help provides step-by-step instructions for performing tasks.

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