Mainframe Storage

Support for external syslog monitoring

For awhile now CSM has provided the ability to manage DS8000 logical pathing for remote copy relationships through a port pairing CSV file.  This CSV file defines what port pairs to use between storage systems or logical storage systems when CSM establishes relationships.  This port pairing CSV file can even be viewed and edited now in the CSM GUI.

Starting with the CSM 6.2.12 release, the port pairing CSV file can now be used to define port pairings for DS8000 Global Mirror control paths.  Global Mirror control paths are used between the primary storage systems in a Global Mirror environment, in order to coordinate consistency group formation.  By specifying 'GM' at the start of the line in the port pairing file, CSM will use that line when defining the control paths for Global Mirror.  CSM supports both generic LSS to LSS level definitions, or you can specify an LSS to LSS level definition for a specific session. 

When defining port pairings for control paths, there should be a line for each Master to Subordinate box necessary in an environment.  Control path lines are NOT bi-directional and so the first box in the line should be the box that will be the Master box and the second box should be a subordinate box. 

CSM will not automatically pickup up changes to the port pairing file for control paths.  The control path definitions will only be looked at when starting a new Master config and not in restarting an existing one.  So if you make an update that needs to be picked up you should Suspend, Recover and then restart the Global Mirror session in CSM.

In a previous release of CSM, code was added so that in the event of an authentication error to a DS8000 storage system, CSM would stop all attempts to reconnect to that storage system so that it would avoid locking out the user due to too many failed login attempts. 

A customer found out however, that there were a number of disconnection errors that CSM processed as an authentication when they were not truly authentication errors. 

In the 6.2.12 release, CSM has added code to ensure that if there is a failure in connecting to a DS8000 storage system, that the server will continue to attempt to reconnect unless the error is truly an authentication error returned by the hardware.

RFE 146509

In a previous release, CSM added the ability to take an "On Demand Dump" or "Warmstart" for a DS8000 storage system in order to collect diagnostic information for the hardware.   Starting with CSM 6.2.12 a new option is now available under the "Create System Diagnostic" action.  By selecting "Save UI logs", CSM will have the hardware collect logs based off the interface and connections to the storage system. This information may be necessary in helping to debug communication errors or DS8000 HMC issues in an environment.

Preserve Mirror allows customers to Flash a Metro Mirror source volume to another Metro Mirror source volume, allowing the hardware to flash the targets for those volumes at the remote site to the same point in time as the local flash.  In multi-target environments though, it is necessary to tell the hardware which of the Metro Mirror relationships should be used for the purposes of Preserve Mirror.  For a number of releases now, CSM has allowed customers to define the role pair to use in the CSM server properties using the following property where the sessionName and rolepair are part of the property name:

com.ibm.csm.<sessionName>.<rolepair>.userpfc  

CSM uses the property after establishing a Metro Mirror pair so that it can send a command to the hardware to tell the hardware that this pair should be used for Preserve Mirror. 

A customer was using this property but discovered that after a HyperSwap occurred, when they attempted to take a FlashCopy, which was now being issued to the remote site, the FlashCopy failed.  The failure was because CSM only used the above property at the time the pair is established, and since the pair had not been "restarted" from the new site yet, the hardware did not know which pair to use for the Preserve Mirror feature. 

Starting with the CSM 6.2.12 release, the CSM server will now look at property immediately after a failover or HyperSwap, and call the hardware to set the option on the pair accordingly.  This will allow customers to continue to use FlashCopy at the new site prior to restarting replication at that new site.

CSM support for DS8000 Safeguarded Copy is designed as a separate session in order to provide the maximum amount of flexibility for customers.  By using Scheduled Tasks customers can customize their solutions and apply Safeguarded Copy to any of the sites within a given solution. 

While the scheduled task is a one time setup that makes managing multiple sessions within CSM a lot easier, having multiple sessions does cause additional work when provisioning and adding new volumes into an environment.  The newly provisioned volumes will need to be added to not only the replication session (MM, GM, MT MM-GM, etc) but also to any Safeguarded Copy sessions to ensure that the new volumes are protected similar to the existing volumes. 

Starting with the CSM 6.2.12 release, customers can now associate another session and role pair to a Safeguarded Copy session.  By associating another session and role pair,  CSM will compare the specified role in that role pair, to the H1 volumes in the Safeguarded Copy session.  If CSM discovers that the volumes in the associated role are different than the H1 volumes in the Safeguarded Copy session, a new IWNR6047W warning message will appear on both the Safeguarded Copy session as well as the associated session, causing the sessions to go into a Warning status.  Once the appropriate copy sets are either added or removed from the corresponding session(s) the warning message will be removed and the session will go back to the normal status.  This feature will help customers ensure that they don't forget to add new volumes into their Safeguarded copy solution.