Hardware requirements

Depending on how you plan to use independent disk pools, you must have the following hardware and operating system releases.

Environments	independent disk pool use	Requirements
Single system	Stand-alone independent disk pool	One iSeries™ server running OS/400^® V5R1M0¹ or later.
Multiple systems		Use either multiple servers or multiple partitions, by doing one of the following: Two or more iSeries servers. One iSeries server running with logical partitions. Note: The version of i5/OS™ or OS/400 must be compatible.
	Switchable independent disk pools	One or more switchable device, do one of the following: One or more expansion units (frame/units) residing on a high-speed link (HSL) loop. One or more input/output processors (IOP) on a shared bus or an IOP that is assigned to an I/O pool².
	Geographic mirroring³	Two or more servers each with sufficient disk space to create the independent disk pools of similar, but not necessarily matching, capability. Note: Consider including hardware for the IP connections. See Communications requirements for more details.

Note:

OS/400 V5R1M0 provides only independent disk pools containing user-defined file system (UDFS) only. OS/400 V5R2M0 or later support library-based objects.
In an LPAR environment, you can switch the input/output processor (IOP) that contains the independent disk pools between system partitions without having an expansion unit. The IOP must be on the bus shared by multiple partitions or assigned to an I/O pool. All input/output adapters (IOAs) on the IOP will be switched.
OS/400 V5R3M0 provides support for geographic mirroring.