The widespread use of data warehousing and increasing use of multimedia data have increased the need for high-speed processing of large volumes of data on networks. To satisfy this need, networks dedicated to data transfer, such as a SAN, are now being used to provide access to storage systems.
The HDLM software manages access paths to storage systems.
HDLM manages the access paths to these storage systems. HDLM provides the ability to distribute loads across multiple paths and switch to another path if there is a failure in the path# that is currently being used, thus improving system availability and reliability.
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Path failures are detected by receiving failure notifications from the OS as a result of performing I/O or path health checks.
The figure below shows the connections between hosts and storage systems. A server on which HDLM is installed is called a host.
For details about the storage systems supported by HDLM, see Storage systems supported by HDLM.