## About Multipathing

With multipathing, also called multipath failover, a system or network can detect when an adapter has failed and automatically switch access to an alternate adapter. Multipathing enables high-availability configuration because it ensures that the data path remains active. Multipathing also helps increase performance to multi-controller disk arrays by spreading I/O between multiple paths into the array.

Within the system, storage pools use multipathing by default. To complete the data path, data hosts also need the ability to multipath. Therefore, all data hosts need one of the following software products:

- Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager is Sun's multipathing solution for Fibre Channel connected storage devices. This software is provided as part of the Sun StorEdge SAN Foundation software. See the SAN Foundation software documentation for information on downloading, installing, and configuring this software.
- VERITAS Volume Manager with DMP

### Related Topics

- About the Software Architecture