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ServeRAID M5210 SAS/SATA Controller for IBM System x User’s Guide
July 2014
Chapter 1: Overview
Benefits of the ServeRAID M5210 SAS/SATA Controller
1.5.5
Usability Features
The following list describes the usability features of the ServeRAID M5210 controller:
Simplifies cabling with point-to-point, serial architecture
Supports smaller, thinner cables that do not restrict airflow
Provides drive spin-up sequencing control
Provides up to two LED signals for each PHY to indicate link activity and faults
Provides an I2C interface for enclosure management
Supports the external SAS Sideband signal SFF-8485 and SFF-8448 (SGPIO) standards.
1.5.6
Flexibility Features
These features increase the flexibility of the ServeRAID M5210 controller:
Supports a Flash ROM interface, a nonvolatile static RAM (NVSRAM) interface, and a pipelined synchronous burst
SRAM (PSBRAM) interface
Offers a flexible programming interface to tune I/O performance
Allows mixed connections to SAS targets or SATA III targets
Leverages compatible connectors for SAS connections and SATA III connections
Allows grouping of up to four PHYs in a single quad port to form a wide port
Allows programming of the World Wide Name
1.5.7
CacheCade
CacheCade is an advanced software option that is designed to accelerate the performance of hard disk drive (HDD)
arrays with only an incremental investment in SSD technology. The MegaRAID CacheCade software utilizes SSDs as a
dedicated pool of high-performance cache in front of HDDs to maximize I/O performance for transaction intensive
applications. The key benefits of this software option include:
Accelerated performance of existing HDD arrays with a small up-front investment
Read and Write caching of hot spot data for significant reduction in I/O latency
Optimized for real-world workloads of transaction-intensive applicaitons
Simple, intuitive management tools to assign and manage CacheCade SSD pool
These features help reduce latency bottlenecks for server-based HDD volumes. Applications are often constrained by
the performance limitations of their existing HDDs. With this type of storage infrastructure already in place, a switch to
a new array based purely on SSDs is cost prohibitive. Although SSDs are capable of many more transactions per
second than HDDs, SSDs have a very high cost per gigabyte and are not suited for heavy, large file workloads. You can
accelerate the performance of existing HDD arrays without making substantial investments in new hardware by
deploying LSI MegaRAID CacheCade software, which leverages SSDs in front of HDD volumes to create high-capacity,
high-performance controller cache pools.
1.5.8
Protection Information (T10-DIF)
The T10 Technical Committee of the INCITS standardized the basic requirements to implement a data protection
model for end-to-end data protection. This model protects your data within a storage system from various sources of
corruption that historically have gone undetected. Examples of corruption sources include hardware data path errors
(such as FIFO overruns and underruns), firmware errors (such as arithmetic overflow or incorrect pointer usage), and
external agents overwriting the data in memory.
