Multipathing in a 3PAR Mesh Active Storage Server

I had a question on the blog last week regarding the nature of 3PAR's Mesh Active clustered controller architecture and so I put together this video in response. 

In addition to the tightly integrated cluster design, one of the most unique aspects of 3PAR's Mesh Active architecture is the way disk resources are accessed in parallel by all controllers in the system. The combination of wide striping with the Mesh Active architecture means that customers get excellent, predictable performance - even after a controller failure.

Comments

[Chris Fricke]

Thanks Marc! What keeps track of what bits of the Lun are managed by which controller? Is there a dedicated subsystem for that or is it part of the controller cluster voodoo?

[marc farley]

The distribution of LUNs are done by a virtualization layer we call logical disks. Every controller in the cluster needs to know what controllers are associated with which logical disks. As you suggest, the algorithms of our unique virtualization method are intellectual property (voodoo).