System information

Introduction
1-1
Chapter 1: Introduction
Congratulations on your purchase of our RAID controller. Aiming at serving versatile applications, the RAID controller
ensures not only data reliability but also improves system availability. Supported with cutting-edge IO processing
technologies, the RAID controller delivers outstanding performance and helps to build dependable systems for heavy-
duty computing, workgroup file sharing, service-oriented enterprise applications, online transaction processing,
uncompressed video editing, or digital content provisioning. With its advanced storage management capabilities, the
RAID controller is an excellent choice for both on-line and near-line storage applications. The following sections in this
chapter will present an overview of features of the RAID controller, and for more information about its features and
benefits, please see Appendix B.
1.1 Overview
• Seasoned Reliability
The RAID controller supports various RAID levels, 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and including multi-level RAID, like RAID 10, 30, 50, and
60, which perfectly balances performance and reliability. To further ensure the long-term data integrity, the controller
provides extensive maintenance utilities, like periodic SMART monitoring, disk cloning, and disk scrubbing to proactively
prevent performance degradation or data loss due to disk failure or latent bad sectors.
The controller also supports multi-path I/O (MPIO) solutions tolerating path failure and providing load balance among
multiple host connections for higher availability and performance. Together with active-active redundant-controller
configuration, the RAID system offers high availability without single point of failure.
• Great Flexibility and Scalability
Nowadays, IT staff is required to make the most from the equipments purchased, and thus easier sharing and better
flexibility is a must for business-class storage systems. The RAID controller allows different RAID configurations, like
RAID levels, stripe sizes, and caching policies, to be deployed independently for different logical units on single disk
group, such that the storage resources can be utilized efficiently by fulfilling different requirements.
As business grows or changes during the lifetime of storage systems, the requirements are very likely to be changed, and
the users need to reconfigure the system to support the business dynamics while maintaining normal operations. The
RAID controller allows capacity expansion by adding more disk drives or expansion chassis. Comprehensive online
reconfiguration utilities are available for migration of RAID level and stripe size, volume management, capacity resizing,
and free space management.
• Outstanding Performance
The RAID controller delivers outstanding performance for both transaction-oriented and bandwidth-hungry applications.
Its superscalar CPU architecture with L2 cache enables efficient IO command processing, while its low-latency system
bus streamlines large-block data transfer.
In addition to the elaborated RAID algorithms, the controller implements also sophisticated buffer caching and IO
scheduling intelligence. Extensive IO statistics are provided for monitoring the performance and utilization of storage
devices. Users can online adjust the optimization policy of each LUN based on the statistics to unleash the most power of
the controller.
• Comprehensive and Effortless Management
Users can choose to manage the RAID systems from a variety of user interfaces, including command line interface over
local console and secure shell (SSH), LCD panel, and web-based graphical user interface (GUI). Events are recorded on
the NVRAM, and mail is sent out to notify the users without installing any software or agents. Maintenance tasks like
capacity resizing and disk scrubbing are online executable, and can be scheduled or periodically executed. With the
comprehensive management utilities, users can quickly complete the configurations and perform reconfiguration
effortlessly.