Visualizing IBM SAN Volume Controller FlashCopy Mappings

Last week, I completed a paper on Visualizing SAN Volume Controller FlashCopy Mapping.

SAN Volume Controller (SVC), for those who don’t know, is a block level, in-band, storage virtualization appliance. FlashCopy is a function of SVC which allows you to take instant copies of a whole volume, capturing a single point in time.

As an SVC environment grows, disks become copies of disks and one disk can have multiple disks copied from it. This paper discusses a method to visualize these relationships graphically so that a Storage Administrator can understand the state of his system at a glance.

The paper also acts as a demonstration of automation of the SVC Command Line Interface, with the hope that readers will go on to write their own scripts for their own automation purposes.