80 Implementing the IBM Storwize V7000 with IBM Spectrum Virtualize V8.2.1
3.18  Storwize V7000 configuration backup procedure
Save the configuration before and after any change to the clustered system, such as adding 
nodes and back-end storage. Saving the configuration is a crucial part of Storwize V7000 
management, and various methods can be applied to back up your Storwize V7000 
configuration. The preferred practice is to implement an automatic configuration backup using 
the configuration backup command. Make sure that you save the configuration to storage that 
is not dependent on the SAN Virtualization Controller.
For more information, see Chapter 13, “RAS, monitoring, and troubleshooting” on page 673.
3.19  Performance considerations
Storage virtualization with the Storwize V7000 improves flexibility and simplifies management 
of storage infrastructure, and can provide a substantial performance advantage. The Storwize 
V7000 caching capability and its ability to stripe volumes across multiple disk arrays are the 
reasons why usually significant performance improvements are observed when Storwize 
V7000 is used to virtualize midrange back-end storage subsystems. 
To ensure the performance that you want and verify the capacity of your storage 
infrastructure, analyze performance and capacity to reveal the business requirements of your 
storage environment. Use the analysis results and the guidelines in this chapter to design a 
solution that meets the business requirements of your organization.
When considering performance for a system, always identify the bottleneck and, therefore, 
the limiting factor of a specific system. This is a multidimensional analysis that needs to be 
performed for each of your workload patterns. There can be different bottleneck components 
for different workloads.
When you are designing a storage infrastructure with the Storwize V7000 or implementing a 
Storwize V7000 in an existing storage infrastructure, you must ensure that the performance 
and capacity of the SAN, back-end disk subsystems, and Storwize V7000 meets 
requirements for the set of known or expected workloads.
3.19.1  SAN
The following Storwize V7000 models are supported for V8.2.1: 
/SM590000Control enclosures:
– 2076-524
– 2076-624
/SM590000Expansion enclosures:
– 2076-12F
– 2076-24F 
Tip: Technically, almost all storage controllers provide both striping (in the form of RAID 5, 
RAID 6, or RAID 10) and a form of caching. The real benefit of Storwize V7000 is the 
degree to which you can stripe the data across disks in a storage pool, even if they are 
installed in different back-end storage systems. This technique maximizes the number of 
active disks available to service I/O requests. The Storwize V7000 provides more caching, 
but its impact is secondary for sustained workloads.