Silicon Graphics InfiniteStorage 6120, User Manual

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Introduction
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1.1 Introduction
This section describes the features of the SGI InfiniteStorage 6120 and its hardware.
1.1.1 A SAN Solution
The InfiniteStorage 6120 is a compact network storage system. It combines a controller chassis and
disk enclosure chassis into a single self-contained enclosure.
The InfiniteStorage 6120 plugs seamlessly into existing network environments, thereby protecting
and upgrading investments made in legacy storage and networking products to substantially improve
their performance, availability and manageability.
The InfiniteStorage 6120 is designed to support mixed workload environments with industry-leading
density, a large number of small random IOPS, and high sequential throughput to make it perfect
shared storage for transactional, backup, or rich-media markets. It enables a multi-vendor
environment comprised of standalone and clustered servers, workstations, and PCs to access and
back up data stored in centralized or distributed storage devices in an easy, cost-effective and reliable
manner. This modular architecture ensures high data availability and uptime along with application
performance.
1.1.2 Features of the InfiniteStorage 6120
The InfiniteStorage 6120 incorporates the following features:
• Fibre Channel connectivity
The InfiniteStorage 6120 provides up to 4 individual 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) host port
connections, including simultaneous access to the same data through multiple ports. Each FC
host port supports point-to-point and switched fabric operation.
• Active/Active operation with cache coherency and failover
Both controllers operate in active mode at all times meaning I/O requests can be serviced by
either controller from any host port and failover is transparent to the host.
• RAID 5 & RAID 6
The system is based on a high performance software RAID engine with default RAID5 support
and an optional/licensed RAID6.
• Configurable RAID group sizes
(5 or 9 drives per RAID 5 group, 6 or 10 drives per RAID 6 group)
This feature allows you to configure the system with the desired RAID and redundancy levels
based on the importance of your data. Each RAID group is configured independently and any
valid combination for the number of drives in the array is supported.
• Stripe size of 64KB, 128KB, 256KB
Configurable stripe sizes aid in system tuning for the application’s data pattern. Stripe sizes are
uniquely configurable per RAID set.
• 2 MB maximum request size
This is the maximum transfer size a host may request from the unit and covers nearly all
commonly found uses.
• SAS/SATA storage pool
This feature allows in-box storage pooling, where high-performance SAS drives are used for
primary data and high-capacity SATA drives are used for secondary data or active archiving.