S A S
E N D - U S E R G U I D E
9
Putting Serial Attached SCSI to Work for You
Solution Elements:
Servers with support for multi-path I/O (MPIO) support if path failover is required on
the same server
Cluster Software — single or dual SAS controllers and cluster software per node in the
cluster
SAS ASIC or SAS RAID HBA
JBOD external enclosure
4. Highly-Scalable SAS-based Storage Solution
Application: Future storage growth and flexible disk usage
Once SAS expanders become available, this highly scalable, high-performance solution
will become possible across a wide variety of reliability and availability points.
The two servers, equipped with single or dual SAS RAID HBAs share a large storage pool
composed of SAS JBOD enclosures daisy-chained using SAS connections. Both the host
storage and storage pool are highly scalable, as each SAS expander can connect up to five
chained JBOD enclosures. Cascading the expanders, as shown, greatly increases the
number of devices that can be addressed. Dual redundant paths are created through the
external disk enclosures directly to the disks. SAS drives or SATA drives can be used. Also,
adding RAID 6 further increases the availability of the configuration.
It is ideal for enterprise data centers that require the connectivity of medium-sized SAN
configurations for applications including:
• Business-critical primary storage applications with no single point of failure
• Data warehousing
• Video and audio streaming
• Primary databases
ASIC, HBA or
RAID Controller
ASIC, HBA or
RAID Controller
SAS JBOD
Server 1
Server 2
4x internal cable
to internal drives
4x internal cable
to internal drives
12C
SAS
ASIC
SAS
ASIC
SEP
