Chapter 1: Introduction
Chassis Overview
1-3
Drive bays with drive tray canisters:
The front section of the
subsystem houses sixteen (16) drive bays.
LCD keypad panel and handles:
The forearm handles on the sides
of the subsystem provide an easier means for installing or
retrieving the chassis into and out of a rack or cabinet. The left-
side handle comes with a 2 rows x 16 characters-wide LCD keypad
panel that can be used to access firmware configuration and
monitoring utilities. (Please refer to
Section 1.3.1
)
1.2.2 Rear Panel Overview
The rear panel of the dual-controller subsystem is shown in
Figure 1-3
. The
rear panel provides access to all components located in the rear section of
the chassis. A description of each rear panel component is given below:
Figure 1-3: Subsystem Rear View
•
RAID controller modules:
Each controller module contains a main
circuit board with a DDR RAM DIMM module mounted on it as cache
buffer. (See
Section 1.3.3.
)
About the dual-redundant RAID controllers in A16F-R2431:
For the subsystem featuring redundant RAID controllers, the upper
controller module is identified as
Controller A,
while the lower
controller module is identified as
Controller B.
By factory default,
management tools such as the LCD keypad panel, hyper terminal and
RAIDWatch
®
manager recognize
Controller A
as the primary
controller and
Controller B
as the secondary controller. The Drive
Busy LED on each drive tray indicates the ownership of the managing
controller. For details, please refer to
Chapter 4
.
If
Controller A
fails for any reason (hardware error, software error,
removal from system, etc.), then
Controller B
will take over and
become the primary/managing controller.
If the failed
Controller A
restarts and successfully returns to service, it
will temporarily become the secondary controller.
