Intelligent Storage Environment:

• ISE provides the facilities that help in implementing the intelligent storage array and also managing it.

• This environment contains various physical and logical components for building the architecture for intelligent storage. The following figure shows the intelligent storage environment where the main component is VSM (Virtualized Storage Manager).

• VSM does the job of pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device that is managed by central console (Web Browser).

• All the jobs related to managing the different storage is carried out by VSM

• Intelligent storage environment can have two types:

1. High-end storage systems

2. Mid-range storage systems

   • High end storage systems is referred to as active-active arrays, aimed at large enterprise applications, designed with large number of controllers and cache memory

   • Mid-range storage systems are active-passive arrays, best suited for small and medium sized enterprise applications, can only perform I/O's through LUN only through controller that owns the LUN -typically designed with two controllers, each contains host interfaces, cache, RAID controllers and interface to disk drives.