Configuration
The storage areas are provided (provisioning) not at volume level but at track level from a joint Storage Resource Pool (SRP). This SRP can be formed from different thin pools, from different tiers, and with different attributes. The appropriate provisioning is determined automatically on the basis of the selected Service Level Agreement and the policy set.
The FAST (Automated Storage Tiering) function required for this purpose runs automatically on VMAX3 and transparently for BS2000.
A detailed description is provided in the EMC documentation.
From the server viewpoint, a thin device is no different to a conventional volume. It is displayed with the configured capacity which is theoretically usable.
Provisioning begins only after the first allocation for a volume. Before this, the output columns POOL-NAME and TIER-NAME remain empty when /SHOW-SYMMETRIX-DEVICE-CONFIG is issued. After allocation, the SRP name is output as POOL-NAME. Consequently no unambiguous RAID level and no TIER-TYPE can be output for a volume.
As the volumes of VMAX3 only use areas of the physical storage which are alreafy occupied, only this area is physically copied or transferred for the volume when a local or remote replication is generated. This reduces the synchronization times and the load on the storage system significantly.
Monitoring
SHC-OSD is used to monitor the storage space consumption of thin pools with respect to the utilization of the jointly used thin pools. Monitoring by SHC-OSD can be set, see the THIN-POOL-MONITORING parameter in the SHC-OSD parameter file in the section "Configuration of SHC-OSD".