System Drives
System Administration Manual
133
System Drives
System Drives (SDs) are the basic storage elements used by Titan and are the foundation on
which Silicon File Systems are created. With Parallel RAID Striping, multiple System Drives may
be combined into large File Systems.
System Drives, which are also referred to as LUNs
1
, are logical SCSI devices serviced by the
RAID controllers in the storage subsystem.
Managing System Drives
System Drives are hosted by RAID storage subsystems attached to the server. Titan monitors its
Fibre Channel (FC) links periodically and automatically detects the presence of System Drives
(LUNs). Since Titan could be connected into a Storage Area Network (SAN) that is shared with
other servers, Titan does not automatically make use of System Drives it detects on its FC links,
unless:
❑
The System Drive was created using Web Manager or one of Titan’s embedded
UIs (like the Command Line Interface), or
❑
Access to the System Drive is marked as
Allowed
on the
System Drives
page.
The
System Drives
page lists all of the System Drives (SDs) that are part of the Titan
SiliconServer configuration. This page is also used to set certain SD configuration parameters
and to correlate file systems to System Drives.
Creating System Drives
Storage subsystems use RAID technology (typically RAID 5) to aggregate multiple disk storage
devices into System Drives. The procedure for creating System Drives depends on the storage
enclosure type. For more information, refer to the
FC-14
,
FC-16
,
SA-14
,
AT-14
, and
AT-42
Subsystem sections.
Viewing System Drives
The System Drives page lists all of the System Drives (SDs) that are created in Titan storage
subsystems or SDs automatically
detected
by Titan on the Fibre Channel (FC) network. SDs are
not used unless their access is marked as allowed.
Note:
If a storage enclosure has been added, its SDs may not appear on the
System Drives page. Click Discover System Drives to view the added SDs.
1. Technically, a Logical Unit Number (LUN) is a number that the RAID controller uses to identify a System Drive. Note that the LUN does
not uniquely identify the System Drive on a Fibre Channel network, so the Titan SiliconServer uses an internally generated ID to track
System Drives.