Auxiliary storage pool

In the IBM i operating system, disk drives may be grouped into an auxiliary storage pool (ASP) in order to organize data to limit the impact of storage-device failures and to reduce recovery time.^[1] If a disk failure occurs, only the data in the pool containing the failed unit needs to be recovered. ASPs may also be used to improve performance by isolating objects with similar performance characteristics, for example journal receivers, in their own pool.

By default, all disk drives are assigned to pool 1. Additional pools can be created, but this is rarely done anymore. The concept of IBM i pools is similar to the Unix/Linux concept of volume groups; however, with IBM i it is typical for all disk drives to be assigned to a single ASP.

References