Proware DP-503-F4A3, Installation And User Manual

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DP-503-F4A3 RAID SUBSYSTEM
Installation and User Manual 17
the subsystem are shown below.
RAID
Level
Description Min. Drives
0
Block striping is provide, which yields higher
performance than with individual drives. There is
no redundancy.
1
1
Drives are paired and mirrored. All data is 100%
duplicated on an equivalent drive. Fully
redundant.
2
3
Data is striped across several physical drives.
Parity protection is used for data redundancy.
3
5
Data is striped across several physical drives.
Parity protection is used for data redundancy.
3
6
Data is striped across several physical drives.
Parity protection is used for data redundancy.
Requires N+2 drives to implement because of
two-dimensional parity scheme
4
0 + 1
Combination of RAID levels 0 and 1. This level
provides striping and redundancy through
mirroring.
4
1.4 Fibre Functions
1.4.1 Overview
Fibre Channel is a set of standards under the auspices of ANSI (American National Standards
Institute). Fibre Channel combines the best features from SCSI bus and IP protocols into a
single standard interface, including high-performance data transfer (up to 400 MB per second),
low error rates, multiple connection topologies, scalability, and more. It retains the SCSI
command-set functionality, but uses a Fibre Channel controller instead of a SCSI controller to
provide the interface for data transmission. In today’s fast-moving computer environments, Fibre
Channel is the serial data transfer protocol choice for high-speed transportation of large
volume of information between workstation, server, mass storage subsystems, and peripherals.
Physically, the Fibre Channel can be an interconnection of multiple communication points, called
N_Ports. The port itself only manages the connection between itself and another such end-
port which, which could either be part of a switched network, referred to as a Fabric in FC
terminology, or a point-to- point link. The fundamental elements of a Fibre Channel Network are
Port and Node. So a Node can be a computer system, storage device, or Hub/Switch.
This chapter describes the Fibre-specific functions available in the Fibre Channel RAID controller.
Optional functions have been implemented for Fibre Channel operation which is only available
in the Web browser-based RAID manager. The LCD and VT-100 can’t be used to configure
some of the options available for Fibre Channel RAID controller.
1.4.2 Three ways to connect (FC Topologies)