Chapter 1: Introduction
Product Overview
1-1
Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1. Product Overview
1.1.1 Product
Introduction
This hardware manual briefly introduces the SentinelRAID 170 (SR 170) 320MB/second
SCSI (SCSI-320) -to-SCSI RAID controller shown in
Figure 1-1
.
Figure 1-1: SentinelRAID SCSI-to-SCSI RAID Controller
The SR 170 controller is designed to meet the high availability, high performance, and
extreme fault tolerant demands placed on RAID controllers operating in today’s most
extreme storage environments.
The controller uses RAID technology to endow a host
system with high-speed, fault-tolerant disk storage operation. The SR 170 controller is an
ideal solution for weaving multiple hard drives into one or more contiguous volumes as
well as enhancing storage availability, integrity, and performance.
With high-speed SDRAM modules and firmware in flash memory, a PowerPC
®
RISC
CPU performs all RAID functions on the SR 170 controller, which supports RAID 0, 1
(0+1), 3, 5, 10, 30, 50, or JBOD RAID storage to any host system equipped with a SCSI-
320 interface. The controller’s operation is completely independent of the host operating
system.
Four VHDCI SCSI connectors at the back of the controller board facilitate the connection
of the four SCSI-320 I/O channels to external hosts and drives. All the I/O channels can
be configured either as host or drive. Other external interfaces include two COM ports
and an RJ-45 Ethernet connector. The COM 1 port is used for serial communications and
