DMP provides greater availability, reliability, and performance by using path failover and load balancing. This feature is available for multiported disk arrays from various vendors.
Multiported disk arrays can be connected to host systems through multiple paths. To detect the various paths to a disk, DMP uses a mechanism that is specific to each supported array. DMP can also differentiate between different enclosures of a supported array that are connected to the same host system.
The multi-pathing policy that is used by DMP depends on the characteristics of the disk array.
DMP supports the following standard array types:
The following figure shows how DMP sets up a node for a disk in a supported disk array.
The following figure shows an example where two paths, c1t99d0 and c2t99d0, exist to a single disk in the enclosure, but the single DMP node, enc0_0, is used to access it.