EMC Enhances PowerPath With Volume Manager, Data Migration

The company is also adding non-disruptive data-migration capability to PowerPath, company executives said on Wednesday at the EMC Technology Summit, held here this week.

PowerPath is used to increase application availability and performance and simplify management with multiple channels between servers, switches and storage.

The PowerPath Volume Manager offers such features as striping, mirroring, and slicing of volumes as well as allocating storage into virtual pools to give online storage volume re-configuration, said Erez Ofer, executive vice president of open software operations at EMC.

The new PowerPath will be able to be make multiple point-in-time copies of data without disrupting storage network operations, which should reduce the amount of time spent in backups, including backups to remote locations, Ofer said.

PowerPath will also be enhanced with convenient data-migration capabilities, Ofer said. This will allow data to be migrated to a new array even as the application continues to work on that data without interruption.

Once all the data is copied to the new array and final updates are synchronized, operations will continue as if nothing happened while the old array is retired or re-purposed, he said. It can automatically re-configure an application to access its data at the new location, regardless of where it is located, he said.

The new PowerPath now also works with arrays from Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and Hewlett Packard.

The new version of PowerPath is expected to be available in the third quarter.

The enhancements are part of EMC's plan to evolve storage management into what the company calls information life-cycle management.

Under information life-cycle management, data is automatically migrated to the most suitable class of storage, whether it is enterprise-class arrays, ATA disks or other devices, depending on how quickly that data needs to be accessed.